She had fallen in love two or three times before, rather foolishly. There seemed in her a perversity that drew her to someone who, for one reason or another, could not possibly consider her seriously at the time. It was almost as if she had protected herself by the very impossibility of the person on whom her attention focused. As if she bided her time, playing at love, waiting. She did not want to go through this again. Dirk would soon be off to Cape Town and she must stay on here. With such reminders she tried to fight the softness in herself.
It was during this period that headlines began to shout of new violence in South Africa. Trouble had erupted fiercely in one of the squalid locations near Durban, and Susan showed Dirk the paper as further buttress against her returning to Cape Town.
“I don’t think I’d want to live in South Africa now,” she said. “There are so many terrible things happening there.”
“This is in Cato Manor, where there’s always been trouble,” Dirk said. “It’s a thousand miles from Cape Town.”
“But there’s been trouble in Cape Town too,” she reminded him. “You can’t shrug Langa aside.”
“No one’s shrugging it aside. Listen to me, Susan. You’re talking to a South African now. The press here is never fair to us. Living in a place isn’t like reading headlines. You’ll find it’s business as usual in Cape Town. The coloreds are on our side and you’ll see very little agitation. It’s an explosive and complex problem. Don’t try to judge it sitting here in Chicago.”
He was right, of course, and she let the matter go.
The time came, however, when Dirk dropped his pretense that the passing days were of no consequence.
“Susan, Susan, you must hurry!” he said. “If we wait too long we’ll miss springtime in Cape Town. September and October are the most beautiful months in South Africa—we mustn’t let them go.”
One evening at her apartment, when she had given him dinner again, he spoke to her more brusquely than ever before.
“I must get back to Cape Town,” he told her. “Your father needs me and I have my work to think about. This afternoon I booked my flight home. I’m leaving for New York at the end of the week.”
A darkness of despair welled up in her and she found herself remembering that other departure when it had been Susan van Pelt leaving South Africa. But then she had been a child, helpless to stop what was happening. It was far worse to be grown and equally helpless. Yet because she was grown she must hide her feelings somehow. By an effort she kept her voice steady as she answered him.
“I’ll miss you,” she said and was proud of the fact that she spoke lightly when there was so much hidden pain beneath the words. “But of course you must go. There’s nothing but wasted time for you here.”
He had taken a restless turn around the room and now came back to her with an unexpected light in his eyes, alive with all the dynamic energy that was so vital a part of him. He stood over her as he had done that first time he had visited her here and held her attention by the very force that seemed to move him.
“Believe me, Susan, I didn’t ask for this to happen,” he said. “It’s going to complicate my life quite frightfully. I’m not sure I’m pleased about it. Yet I think I knew it was going to happen that first day when I stood on the tracks and watched you hopping about with a camera that was almost as big as you were.”
She stared at him in dismay, not knowing what he meant, and he took something from his pocket and dropped it almost casually into her lap. It was a small blue and gold jeweler’s box and she looked at it without touching it.
“Open it,” he commanded.
She put a finger to the metal catch and raised the lid. A ring lay against the white satin—a thin gold ring with a polished pink stone in the raised setting.
“The jeweler said it was unheard of to mount an uncut stone,” Dirk said, “but I thought you might like it that way. A bit of polishing has given it more of the look of a diamond. It means something to me this way—uncut. Does it fit, I wonder? I had it made for a very slim finger.”
She looked up at him, unable to believe what was happening, and was startled to see the anxiety so clearly evident behind his quick impersonal manner. He was tense and a little fearful, not at all in proud control of his own emotions as she had believed. She found what she saw in his face more endearing than anything else might have been, and she held out her hand.
“Put it on my finger, please,” she said.
All the angry impatience drained out of him and with it the uncertainty, leaving the engaging younger Dirk she remembered. He sat beside her and took the ring from the box, slipped it onto the third finger of her left hand. There was only tenderness in his manner, and a pleading.
“Now my luck is in your hands, darling,” he said. “Treat it gently.”
Not until she was in his arms did she truly believe in what was happening.
“I booked places for two on that flight to South Africa,” he told her. “And space for two on the plane to New York. Though I’ve been terribly afraid I was going too far. Now there’s the matter of your passport and inoculations, a marriage license, and all the rest. Let’s go to New York and get on with it. Let’s not waste another moment.”
Get on with it they did. She would never have believed that she could break all the threads of her accustomed life with such dispatch and so joyously. Fortunately she had already packed or given away most of her mother’s things. The apartment was sublet to a friend on the paper. Dirk drove her across the state line for a quicker marriage than could be arranged in the city, and Susan found herself on the plane for New York with a man who was now her husband.
In spite of the breathless quality of all that was happening, there was time for the happiness that lay between them. This, Susan knew, was what she had been waiting for all these lonely years. This was the answer to her nostalgia, to her sense of something left unfinished. She knew why no one else would ever do. In her was some guiding force wiser than conscious thought which had waited only for Dirk. Whatever South Africa held for her, she would now be able to face it because Dirk was part of her life, she of his. This was the most satisfying thing of all—his need of her, so tenderly clear.
Only now and then did she remember Niklaas van Pelt and try to bargain a little.
“If you’re marrying me just to take me home to my father, you’re making a mistake,” she told him, teasing a little. “I still haven’t promised to see him, you know.”
Dirk was offhand. “We’ll talk about that when the time comes. I’ve written Uncle Niklaas airmail about our change in plans. Though if I thought you were serious about the accusation you’ve just made—”
She kissed him warmly to prove that she had not been serious. His reassurance was hardly necessary. It was clear in his eyes, in his touch, that he was a man in love.
Their days in New York shone through a haze as pink as the diamond on her finger. She glowed with happiness and contentment and Dirk said she grew prettier every day.
The only part of her old life that she had brought with her was her own small 35mm. camera and Dirk humored her in her picture taking.
“So I’ve married a career woman, have I?” he laughed when she insisted that camera and light meter accompany her on their daytime jaunts. She explained gently, but with a certain firmness, that there was no reason why she should not continue to sell pictures to American and British magazines and papers. The eyes of the world were turned toward Africa these days.
She particularly enjoyed taking pictures of Dirk—shots that showed his bright, laughing quality and ignored the captious side that occasionally showed itself in an unexpected moment. At times she suspected that something was worrying him, something he kept from her, and that some problem awaited him in South Africa. She suspected that it might well concern her father. Perhaps he would disapprove of this sudden marriage of his ward to a daughter he did not know—the daughter of a woman who had left him. She hoped she was wrong if this meant hurt and a d
ifficult situation for Dirk. But for the moment she could only try with all her heart to adjust to these moods of Dirk’s and keep from questioning him. She did not, however, want to record such shadows with her camera. These were the sunny days, and must be captured as such.
It was still September, still spring in South Africa, when they boarded the big American plane at New York’s International Airport. Even by jet it was a long and wearying trip, and Dirk had allowed for stopovers in Accra and Brazzaville. They left French Equatorial Africa in the early morning and set down in Johannesburg in midafternoon. Jo’burg was the port of entry—the City of Gold, “Goli,” as the dark people called it—a relatively young and booming metropolis of great wealth and great poverty.
When they had gone through immigration and passports and baggage had been checked, they sat in the busy waiting room before huge bay windows of glass and watched planes taking off for every part of Africa and the world. They were truly in South Africa now, and Susan saw the SLEGS VIR BLANKES signs for the first time. Signs that were translated as “Europeans Only,” “European” meaning “white.” She winced at the signs just as she would have winced at similar signs in the American South.
All signs were given in the two languages of the country, and so were the announcements over loudspeakers. Susan had forgotten her Afrikaans, but as she listened, the sound of it began to return and it seemed not unfamiliar.
Once, to her surprise, Dirk’s name was paged over the loudspeaker and he hurried away to pick up the message. When he returned he looked a little angry.
“Was it word from my father?” she asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “It was merely a warning.”
The word startled her. “A warning?”
“Oh, it’s not as bad as all that,” he said, managing a smile. “Someone thought I ought to know that John Cornish is going to Cape Town. He’ll be aboard our plane.”
He said nothing more and seemed to lose himself in his own remote thoughts, so that she was left wondering. Why had it seemed necessary to let Dirk know that Cornish would be aboard their plane? If the harm John Cornish had done lay in the past, how could his presence in South Africa affect her father now? And why had Dirk used the word “warning”?
When their flight to Cape Town was called, they started across the tarmac to a plane with a springbok symbol marking the nose. Suitably enough, since the South African gazelle with the curving horns had the habit of springing high into the air.
“I feel as though I were going too fast,” Susan whispered, clinging to Dirk’s arm. “Some of me is still back home. I haven’t caught up with me yet.”
Dirk did not hear her. He was watching a man up ahead mounting the steps to the plane.
“Look quickly,” he said. “The tall chap up there wearing a gray topcoat—that’s John Cornish. He’ll be aboard, all right.”
She looked in time to see the tall man vanish through the door. The glimpse of a straight back told her little and he was out of sight by the time a stewardess showed them to their seats.
“Do you know him well?” she asked, letting Dirk help her with her seat belt.
“I knew him as a boy,” Dirk said.
“How well did he know my father?”
“Actually, he knew him very well. Cornish grew up on a veld farm near Kimberly and your half brother Paul was his closest friend. They were in the war together—as commandos.”
“Tell me about my family,” Susan said. “I know so little. It doesn’t seem real that I’ve had half brothers and a half sister. I know the eldest boy died as a child, but I’m not sure about the others.”
“Your sister married and went out to Australia to live,” Dirk said. “Paul died in Italy during the war. Cornish was wounded at the same time and was shipped home to recover. He had a bad time with his leg and that put him out of the fighting. He still limps a bit. When he came home he went into the field that always interested him, journalism. Your father eased his way more than once. Which made it all the harder for Uncle Niklaas to take when Cornish turned on him a year or so later.”
The plane was taxiing into place for the take-off, and Susan forgot John Cornish and all that concerned him. In the days when she had lived in South Africa, the Blue Train had still been the main luxury accommodation, taking a good many hours to cover the thousand miles to Cape Town. Now the airplane was the popular and luxurious means of transportation.
The sign of the springbok was everywhere in the plane, woven into the green aisle carpet and into the seat covers. But this was a springbok turned Pegasus and Susan had yet to catch her breath. She was experiencing not only the normal difficulty of today’s air passenger in keeping up with the speed of her flight but also the feeling in her own case of rushing too rapidly back into the past.
They flew over the crowded huddle of Johannesburg, where the white man had space and the black man did not. The strange yellow-white mounds of gold mine dumps loomed below, square with slanted sides, and then the plane was away, and Susan looked down upon open country. The green faded quickly and the veld spread below, a bare and tawny land, not yet wakened, as it would be briefly, by the touch of spring.
Africa had surprised her because, except for the equatorial belt, there had been so little jungle green. So much of the land was tan and dull gold and sometimes reddish. In the past it had been wholly lion country, of course, and that was still its color—the tawny yellow of the lion.
Dirk read a magazine, hardly glancing out the window at a view long familiar, but Susan, in the window seat, could not take her eyes from the scene that swept below the plane. Nothing as yet had brought a sense of recognition, but she knew that would come eventually. Ahead in Cape Town the mountain awaited her. She had never forgotten the mountain. Sometimes it came into her dreams, pressing vastly above her as if it would crush her by its very mass of high-thrust granite.
Before they reached Kimberley, dusk hid the land and in the great spreading darkness below there were few lights to be seen. The distances of Africa were immense and so often empty of human life.
“Talk to me,” she pleaded, slipping a hand beneath Dirk’s on the arm of the seat between them. “Africa frightens me a little. It’s rushing toward me over the years. Right now there’s nothing but space and emptiness around me, but when I come down Africa will be waiting. And I’m not ready for it.” She tried to laugh, but there was a catch in her throat.
He put aside his magazine and covered her fingers with his own. She leaned back in her seat and let the new delight of sensation that his touch could arouse sweep away obscure fears. For now, this was enough. Love was her protection for whatever awaited her in South Africa.
“What do you remember best about Cape Town?” he asked quietly, as if by the very softness of his tone he would avoid rousing her sleeping fears. “What do you remember of your father?”
She closed her eyes in order to invite the pictures. The mountain was there so easily, whenever she summoned it. And glimpses of the house in Cape Town—Protea Hill. She could remember Dirk too, flashing in and out of the pictures with his bright fair hair and blue eyes. But when she tried to think of her father, to recall his face or even to summon back the look of her mother as she had been sixteen years ago, the vision blurred as if she had dropped pebbles into a pool, causing the surface to waver into distortion. With every throb of its engines the plane was hurling her toward her father and, though she had made no promise to see him, the inevitability of their meeting was there like a wall against which she was sure to fling herself. She dreaded the probable crash, and dared not think about it.
“Don’t ask me to remember now,” she said. “Let all that take care of itself when the time comes. Tell me about you instead. How did my father happen to take you as his ward?”
Dirk’s fingers released her own and he stared unseeingly at the magazine in his lap. “My father, as you know, was a German,” he said at length. “He was interned and I never saw him again because he died before
the war was over. He had worked on the farm for your father. Afterwards my mother died. Of grief, I’ve always believed. Niklaas van Pelt took me into his home. It was a simple enough thing.”
He spoke without emotion, yet Susan sensed a depth of feeling that denied the simplicity he claimed. There were dregs of painful memory in Dirk. She must learn to know these things a little at a time. The very learning meant a loving exploration. Only in the closeness of marriage could the delight of knowing another person be fully plumbed. But such a plumbing could not be managed quickly. Falling in love was one thing. Loving was another. There must be growth and time for growth.
“Perhaps we should both leave the things that hurt alone until we really want to talk about them,” she said. “I won’t ask you again. I’ll make a pact with you on that. There’s plenty of time.”
Dirk looked past her out the big oval of the window. “We’re over Kimberley,” he said, “and coming in for a landing.”
The distraction served and she hardly noticed that he had agreed to no such pact on his part.
A stewardess announced that they would have approximately forty minutes on the ground and then the plane was taxiing along a runway of the small airport.
Dirk flung Susan’s coat about her shoulders as they left the plane and she was grateful for its warmth. The spring night was cold, the air sharply invigorating.
MIND YOUR HEAD—PASOP U KOP. She saw the sign between two small buildings as they walked from the plane to the fenced enclosure where passengers might wait. After a look about inside the small restaurant, they returned to the brisk clear air and stood beneath the stars, content enough to be close to the earth for a little while.
Blue Fire Page 3
