Blue Aloes | Page 3

hover round the estate, mystically encircling it, and cutting
it off from the rest of the desert. This was the century-old hedge of blue
aloes which gave the farm its name. Planted in a huge ring of many

miles' circumference, the great spiked cacti, with leaves thick and flat
as hide shields, and pointed as steel spears, made a barrier against cattle,
ostriches, and human beings that was impassable except by the
appointed gaps. No doubt it had a beauty all its own, but beneath its
fantastic, isolated blooms and leaves of Madonna blue, the gnarled
roots sheltered a hundred varieties of poisonous reptiles and insects.
That is why, in Africa, no one likes blue aloes--they always harbour
death.
Dawn on the Karoo more than compensates for its fearsome nights and
torrid noontides. The dew, jewelling a thousand spider-webs, the
sparkling brightness of the air, the exquisite purity of the atmosphere,
and grandeur of space and loneliness rimmed about by rose-tipped
skies and far forget-me-not hills make a magic to catch the heart in a
net from which it never quite escapes.
Christine felt this enchantment as she wandered across the veld, her
eyes fixed on the hills from behind which the sun would presently
emerge to fill the land with a clear, pitiless heat that turned everything
curiously grey. A dam of water reflecting pink cloud-tips lay bright and
still as a sheet of steel. The fields of lucerne, under the morning light,
were softly turning from black to emerald, and beyond the aloe hedge a
native kraal that was scattered on the side of a hill slowly woke to life.
A dog barked; a wisp of smoke curled between the thatched huts, and
one or two blanketed figures crept from the low doors. The simple yet
secret lives of these people intrigued Christine deeply. She knew little
of Kafirs, for she had been in Africa only a few months; but the
impassive silence of them behind their watching, alert eyes always
fascinated her. They said so little before their masters, the whites. Here,
for instance, was a little colony of fifty or more people living in a kraal
close to their employers. Some of them were grey-haired and had
worked for a quarter of a century on the farm--the men on the land, the
women at the house--yet, once their daily tasks were over, none knew
what their lives were when they returned to the straggling village of
palisades and low-doored huts.
Musing on these things, Christine turned at last and sauntered slowly

homeward. Everything was still very quiet, but smoke was rising from
the solid farm chimneys, and, rounding the corners of some large
outbuildings, she came suddenly upon more life--feathery, fantastic life
of spindlelegs and fluttering wings. Scores of baby ostriches, just
released from their night shelter, were racing into the morning light,
pirouetting round each other like crazy, gleesome sprites. Christine
stood laughing at their fandangos and the antics of the Kafirs engaged
in herding them. A man standing near, pipe in mouth, and hands in
pockets, observing the same scene, was astonished that her sad yet
passionate face could so change under the spell of laughter. He had
wondered, when he first saw her, why a girl with such ardent eyes
should wear such weariness upon her lips and look so disdainfully at
life. Now he saw that it was a mask she wore and forgot when she was
alone, and he wondered still more what had brought such a girl to be a
governess on a Karoo farm.
But in a moment Christine's face changed, resuming, like a veil over its
youth and bloom, the look of world-weariness. She bowed slightly to
him, with a somewhat cool response to his pleasant morning greeting,
and made haste to resume her walk homeward.
She knew him to be Richard Saltire, the government forest and land
expert, who was engaged in certain experiments on the farm. He shared
a bungalow somewhere on the land with two young Hollanders who
were learning ostrich-farming, and came with them to lunch every day
at the house. Already, his bold, careless face, with its sunbitten beauty,
had separated itself in her memory from the faces of the other men, for
it was a face and personality that could not leave a woman undisturbed.
Incidentally, it had disturbed her in connection with an impression not
altogether agreeable.
One of the first hints Mrs. van Cannan had given the new governess
was that the master of Blue Aloes did not care for any kind of intimacy
to exist between the womenfolk of the farm and the men occupied
about it. Christine had been long enough in South Africa to recognize
that this was an odd departure from the general rule of friendliness and
equality;