THE CHARTER FLATS

Later in the day the party arrived back from Susi, and in the cool of the afternoon a last good-bye was said to the mission station, and they all returned to the Zimbabwe camp for their last night.

It had been casually mentioned that Carew had paid a flying visit the previous evening and gone again early that morning, but very little was said about the circumstance. Stanley was already beginning to look and feel disconsolate over the approaching exodus, and Diana was very full of the fact that she had shot a duyker. “I didn’t really aim at him, you know,” she told Grenville naively; “I just held up the gun and pulled the trigger. I couldn’t believe my own eyes when I saw the buck lying dead. All the same I did shoot him, and I’ve got his horns, and they will occupy the place of honour when I get back in my own private sanctum. I shall not tell the Jo’burg folk about not aiming; why should I? If I describe the buck going at full speed, and how I bowled him over with one shot, it won’t be any more of a lie, if as much, as most of you colonists tell when you get home to civilisation.”

“Certainly not,” agreed Grenville gravely; “but why not make it a lion while you are about it, or even a rhinoceros?”

The Kid began to giggle. “And let it be just charging you,” he suggested joyfully. “And first you must take a snapshot of it charging, and then you must fire into its mouth and blow its brains out.”

“And you might have its horns polished and mounted and its tail stuffed,” added Grenville.

“Silly idiots,” scornfully. “You’re both jealous. If you could have seen the things The Kid missed!”

“The Kid generally misses,” chimed in Ailsa cheerfully. “He gets so excited, he quivers all over, and the wild beast, or whatever it is, just lollops away, throwing a grin over his shoulder at him.”

“If you don’t mind,” threatened Stanley, “I’ll give away your hippo story.”

“It has increased,” said Ailsa’s big, schoolboy husband, chuckling to himself.

“Impossible!...” ejaculated The Kid. “Surely it had already reached the limit of human ingenuity?”

They both spluttered, and Ailsa threw a newspaper at them, but Diana demanded to be told the story.

“O, it’s only about a hippo in the Zambesi, above the Victoria Falls,” began Stanley; “a perfectly harmless hippo really, but it had the impudence to look at the canoe in which Mrs. Grenville was travelling back to the hotel in the dusk.”

“I thought it bumped the canoe up and down on its back,” said the missionary, still chuckling.

“That came later”; and Stanley addressed himself gravely to Diana. “But at one time the story really did stop at the hippo chasing them on to an island and off it again, and opening and shutting its mouth at them.”

“If you had been there you would have been terrified, and had hysterics or something,” Ailsa flung at him.

“I certainly should at the later period of the story,” he assured her.

“When it played catch-ball with them?” suggested the missionary. “Threw them all into the air and caught them again in the canoe.”

“That wasn’t so bad, since it did catch them,” said Stanley. “My horror would have been when it climbed the tree after them!...”

“That is the part that has increased,” put in the schoolboy husband, beginning to shake again. “It now jumps after them from one tree to another,” and then they both spluttered insanely, and Diana joined in because it was so infectious, and Ailsa called them all ridiculous children who ought to be given a sweetie and tucked up in bed.

A little later the cavalcade got under way, and Grenville and his wife stood waving to them somewhat sorrowfully from their wilderness home.

“They are dear people,” Ailsa said; and added, “O, Billy, if Major Carew would but come out of his shell and love Meryl!... I am sure she cares for him ... and she is so sweet ... and he O, he is just like a figure of stone.”

Grenville pinched her ear affectionately. “Little matchmaker! No one by taking thought can add one cubit to his stature; and no one by just wishing it, I am inclined to think, can influence the little god Cupid whither he will aim his arrow. Perhaps, perhaps not; that is all there is to say ever.”

The next morning after a very early breakfast, the travellers started on their way to Enkeldorn en route for Salisbury. And at the top of the valley, whither they walked to save the mules, both girls stood and turned for a long last look at the grey walls of the ancient temple, lying in a soft haze of morning mists. It seemed to Meryl it had never held a deeper fascination, a stronger allurement. Just those old, old walls, and the soft enfolding mists which must have enfolded them even so for perhaps three thousand years. The red of sunrise was still in the sky, for Mr. Pym was an early starter, and it tinged the mist with a soft flush where the sun’s rays had not yet lit a clearer light.

“It was good to come,” said Diana simply. “I have to thank you for it.”

But Meryl only smiled in response. She had nothing to say. She felt she was leaving behind with the ruins the best memory her life would ever hold. Then they climbed into the ambulance waiting for them, said “good-bye” charmingly to the lonely dwellers at the store and hotel, with whom they had had some pleasant chats, drinking tea and admiring the lovely view from their delightful huts, and went clattering away down the road, their faces turned to the north.

And in the valley they left behind there was desolation.

Carew arrived back at his quarters, grim and taciturn, in the evening, to find Stanley looking a veritable image of disconsolate hopelessness in spite of Moore’s persistent droll badinage.

“O, what did they want to come for,” he groaned, “if they had to go away again?”

“Faith!...” said the astute Irishman. “Did ye ask either of them to share your little wooden hut?...”

But The Kid paid no attention. As Carew stood a moment beside him, filling a pipe, with a cold, expressionless face, the youngster glanced up with a momentary gleam, and remarked, “Eh, sir? But women are the devil, aren’t they?”

Carew said nothing; but with a low chuckle Moore ejaculated, “Come, give the divil a chance; we find him very accommodating sometimes in auld Erin.”

Stanley got up and stretched himself. “Days and weeks of desolation now,” he moaned; “and we were so happy and content before. Moore, old chap” giving that harmless individual a smack on the back that nearly knocked him over “yours was the wise choice when we spoke of gifts from heaven. I said, ‘Give me millionairesses,’ and you, with the wisdom of the ages, said, ‘Give me whisky.’ I’ll take a little now and hope for the best.”

And still Carew said nothing. The pipe was filled and he slowly lit it. Then unexpectedly he tapped it with light significance. “This is the best friend of all,” he said, and went away into his hut.

Stanley glanced after him a moment with a curious expression. “Gad!...” he murmured. “Was our bronze image a bit hit too? He looks fierce enough and stern enough to be resenting a dent.”

In the meantime the travellers reached the Charter Flats, and decided to camp there for the night. They had travelled for some time along the sandy tracts, enjoying the sense of space all around and the wide horizons, and both Mr. Pym and the girls were loth to hurry away. It is customary to dread these wide sandy tracts, and either hurry across them or avoid them; but to these city-dwellers their vast calm held a deep allurement; for though only scrub and sand stretched from horizon to horizon, with occasional little strips of stunted trees, the clear southern atmosphere lent a lovely effect of light and shade and colour. Many large patches here and there were blackened with veldt fires, but these in the distance formed delicate shadings that enhanced the charm of a strip of yellow sand or young green grass or purple-shadowed wilderness. It was like a world that contained only a colour scheme; no dwellings, no humans, no landmarks, no hills and valleys, no roads: just delicate shadings and haze as far as the eye could see, with no clear line between earth and heaven. They might have been looking over the edge of the world into a delicately tinted space, so boundless it seemed, so unfathomable, so remote. They pitched their camp on a little rising ground, near a slow meandering stream that crept lazily across the miniature desert. And when the dusk came down the effect was more unusual still, for the flats are on high ground, and the heavens seem to stoop down all round, hanging a dark curtain, decorated with brilliant stars, on every side. Across all the world no sign of human life, no sound; only vast emptiness everywhere above, around, below; and for companions, worlds and suns and solar systems.

It is a scene in which a man may seem to get very close to his God; not a remote, incomprehensible Deity, dwelling vaguely beyond the stars, but a Presence that is in the breathing silence and the velvety deeps at hand. And a man may meet himself there also; not the aping, grinning, chattering mask of a personality custom more or less compels him to wear in the crowd, but the hidden, mysterious being, conscious of a soul beyond his ken, that in such quiet hours desires eternally some goal, some good, afar off. The indestructible, incomprehensible, infinite hunger, that lies as a germ in every human heart and is man’s best attribute, in that it raises him for ever incontestably above the beasts that perish, and stands serene and steadfast as the Rock of Ages, the one barrier past which the materialists and the scientists cannot go: the divine spark within the human, which no theory can account for and no learning of sage or cynic obliterate.

The travellers sat round a glowing fire, for the night air was keen and cold; and much that is inevitably disturbing in the friction of daily being and daily doing seemed to fall away from them and cease to exist for that one wonderful night. And the next day, when the small black attendant brought their early tea and opened wide the tent-flap to a brilliant morning, yet another picture awaited them. This time it was a world decked with enormous diamonds. Tall, sparse grasses leant over and whispered to each other outside the tent, and every ear and every seed was hung with a lovely brilliant dewdrop. Out beyond was that same vague, remote, fathomless horizon, painted now with wonderful rose tints, where the rising sun caught the lingering mists and merged the dark streaks of blackened veldt into the general scheme with a softness of shading beyond all description. Meryl lay still, gazing with her soul in her eyes, but after a time Diana sat up.

“It makes me ache almost like the Victoria Falls did. I wonder why God painted such lovely scenes where no one ever came, or scarcely ever, to see them?”

She was silent a moment, then ran on again, “We fight and sweat and struggle for diamonds, and God hangs them on the dry grass, in the wilderness. Meryl, I wonder if we shall ever see anything quite like this again? And they told us to avoid the Charter Flats!... I suppose God feels about it something as we do. He knows most people like Brighton parades and Durban sea-fronts, so He lets them arrange their own sights; and for Himself, in far wonderful places, He paints scene pictures, and plants lovely gardens, and fills them with birds and flowers and sunshine, and splashes down upon the world, in some remote corner, a glorious colour scheme, just for his own delight.”

Meryl raised herself on her elbow, with a little tender smile. “And I suppose He said to Himself, ’I will let Diana and Meryl Pym see one of my secret, treasured places’?”

“Yes, exactly. And though I don’t hold with saying grace before meals, because, since God made us, it seems the least He can do to enable us to obtain food to keep us alive, I will say a grace this morning to Him for letting me see His colour scheme on the Charter Flats at sunset and sunrise.”

A little later they had a fragrant breakfast of liver from a buck the engineer had shot about daybreak; and that is a delicacy known only to those who fare forth across the veldt, and have a bright wood fire burning in readiness for the spoils of the hunt directly they are brought in.

Then they started away again across the flats, once more moving in a vague world of soft shadings, with only the long sandy road stretching away into space behind them and before. And sometimes, before the sun mounted too high, they found themselves moving across a space of gold and bronze, where grass that had not been burnt shone like amber in the morning glory; and again presently a space of loveliest emerald-green, where the grass had been burnt early and the new blades were already sending up joyous blades into the sunlight. And sometimes a Kaffir-boom tree added a splash of brilliant scarlet, painted upon a canvas of soft, hazy shadings; and sometimes the veldt showed them a little piece of her flower-carpet the carpet that was to spread broadcast presently of delicate-tinted lovely flowers in reckless profusion upon a ground of rich terra-cotta soil.

Neither girl talked. It was not a scene to talk in. It did not call for raptures and exclamations; only for dreaming and absorbing. It seemed as if it might have been the spot where God rested upon the seventh day, so utter and absolute and complete was the sense of detachment from all the exigencies of being and doing.

Two verses of a poem by Arthur Symons repeated themselves in pleasant rhythm in Meryls mind:

“I leave the lonely city street,
The awful silence of the crowd;
The rhythm of the roads I beat,
My blood leaps up, I shout aloud,
My heart keeps measure with my feet.

“A bird sings something in my ear,
The wind sings in my blood a song
’Tis good at times for a man to hear;
The road winds onward white and long,
And the best of earth is here!”