POPPY

THE STORY OF A SOUTH AFRICAN GIRL

BY

CYNTHIA STOCKLEY

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS NEW YORK AND LONDON

The Knickerbocker Press

1910

Published, March, 1910 Reprinted, March, 1910; May, 1910 July, 1910 (twice); August, 1910 September, 1910; October, 1910

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

To

Em

[2]

PART I

"... and some do say of poppies that they be the tears of the moon shed in a land beyond the seas: and that they do bring forgetfulness and freedom from pain." (From an old Irish Legend.)

[3]

POPPY

NOTHING more unlike a gladsome poppy of the field was ever seen than Poppy Destin, aged nine, washing a pile of dirty plates at the kitchen table.

Pale as a witch, the only red about her was where she dug her teeth into her lips. Her light lilac-coloured eyes were fierce with anger and disgust. Her hair hung in long black streaks over her shoulders, and her dark hands, thin and bony as bird's claws, were each decorated with a bracelet of greeny-yellowy grease.

There had been curry for dinner. Horrible yellow rings floated on the top of the water in the skottel and Poppy hated to put her hands into it.

She was hating her work more than usual that day because she was hungry as well as angry. She had slapped her little cousin Georgie for throwing a heavy hammer at her which had cut a gash in her leg; and her punishment for this crime had been two stinging boxes on the ear and sentence to go without food all day. Fortunately the incident had occurred after breakfast.

Once or twice she looked longingly at the scraps on the plates, but she did not touch them, because her aunt had eaten from one and she was not sure which, and she knew that to eat from anything her aunt had touched would choke her.

So she threw the scraps to Nick the black cat, under the kitchen table, and went on hating her aunt, and washing[4] up the plates. She would have liked to smash each plate on the floor as she took it out of the water, and to have thrown all the greasy water over the freshly-scrubbed white shelves and dresser. And she would have done it too, only that she did not like boxes on the ear.

Presently she tried to fill her bitter little heart and her empty little stomach by going on with the story inside her head. She always had a story going on inside her head, and it was always about just two people—a beautiful lady and a man with a face like Lancelot. She used to begin at the end to make sure they should be quite happy, and when she had married them and they were living happily "ever after," she would go back to the beginning—how they met and all the sad things they had to go through before they could be married. Afterwards she would make a little song about them.

That day she had a heroine with red gold hair for the first time, because she had seen such a beautiful red-gold-haired lady in the street the day before, dressed in brown holland with a brown hat trimmed with pale green leaves. Poppy dressed her heroine in the same fashion, instead of the usual white velvet with a long train and a wreath of white roses resting on her hair. Just as Lancelot was telling the heroine that her eyes were as beautiful as brown wine, a harsh voice called out from the dining-room:

"Porpie! Haven't you done that washing-up yet? Make haste there! You know you got to smear the kitchen before you clean yourself and take the children up to the Kopje."

Poppy gritted her teeth and furious tears came into her eyes; her aunt's voice always seemed to scrape something inside her head and make it ache; also, she detested taking the children up to the Kopje. It was such a long way to carry Bobby—all up Fountain Street in the broiling sun[5]—and she had to carry him, because if she put him into the pram with his twin, Tommy, they kicked each other and screamed, and when the children screamed, Aunt Lena always got to hear of it and boxed Poppy's ears for ill-treating them.

Listlessly she dried the plates and stuck them up in lines on the dresser, soaked the fadook and washed all round the edges of the bowl, making the water swirl round and round so that the grease would not settle again, then, while the water moved swiftly, carried the basin to the back door and emptied it with a great "swash" into the yard. The fowls flew shrieking in every direction and the water ran down in little rivers to where old Sara was doing some washing under the shade of the biggest acacia tree. When the little stream reached her bare black feet she clicked her teeth, crying, "Aah," and moved round to the other side of the stones on which she banged the clothes to make them white.

Poppy dried her basin out with the fadook, wiped the table dry, and put the bowl upside down upon it. Then she went into the yard again and approached an old pail which stood in the forage-house. It was full of an atrocious mess, slimy and thick, giving out a pungent odour that made her nose wrinkle in disgust. Nevertheless she took it up and carried it down to old Sara to get some soapy water. The old Basuto in her red kop-dook, rolled the whites of her eyes sympathetically and muttered in her native tongue as she watched Poppy stir the green slime with a stick. She was sorry for the child. She knew it was Kaffir's work to smear floors. Black hands are hard, and the little thorns and stones to be found in the wet cow-dung do not hurt them; neither does the pungent smell disgust black noses.

"But the old missis had strange ways! Clk! It seemed she liked the klein-missis to do Kaffir's work!" Old Sara[6] shrugged her fat, wobbly shoulders, and flopped over her wash-tub once more.

Poppy went back to the kitchen. She had swept it just before dinner, now she sprinkled it heavily with water, then kneeling down on a folded sack beside the bucket, she rolled up her sleeves, closed her eyes, and plunged her hands into the sickening mess. Quickly she withdrew them, flinging two handfuls on to the floor and began to smear it with the flat of her right hand.

Kitchens and verandahs (or stoeps) in old-fashioned South African houses always have what are called "mud floors," which means that they are just mother-earth with all the stones picked out and the surface kept smooth and level by constant smearing in or pasting on of wet cow-dung once or twice a week. Smearing is a disgusting business, but joy comes after. When freshly dry the floor looks cool and green and fresh, and no longer does the mis smell vilely; rather, there is a soft odour of grasses and flowers, as though some stray veldt wind had blown through the room.

But Poppy had no time to enjoy the result of her labour. After she had spread sacks upon the floor to prevent feet from marking her work until it was dry, she stopped for a moment to dig out a thorn from her thumb with a needle, but immediately her aunt's menacing voice could be heard from the front stoep, where now she sat drinking her after-dinner cup of coffee with her husband, admonishing the slowness of Poppy's proceedings, and demanding that she should "makaste."

Poppy ran into the bedroom which she shared with her two elder cousins, and cleaned herself of all traces of her recent occupation. Later she appeared on the front stoep, in a print pinafore over her grey linsey dress, and an old straw hat much bitten at the edges shading her pale fierce little face.[7]

"My word, that child looks more like an Irish Fenian every day!" was her aunt's agreeable greeting.

Weak, good-looking "Uncle Bob," who was really no more than a second cousin of Poppy's, laughed in a deprecating kind of way. He was cutting a twist of tobacco from a great roll that hung drying from the stoep roof.

"Och, you're always going on at the girl, Lena!"

"And good cause I have," retorted Mrs. Kennedy. "Stand still, Ina, while I tie your cappie."

Poppy said nothing, but if having black murder in your heart makes you a Fenian, she knew that she was one.

Silently she assisted her aunt to put their pinafores upon the struggling twins, and to array Ina in her cape and bib—all starched to stand about them like boards, to their everlasting misery and discomfort. Mrs. Kennedy gloated upon the fact that all the neighbours said, "How beautifully kept Mrs. Kennedy's children are!"

At last Tommy was in the pram; Bobby pranced astride on Poppy's small bony hip, and Ina, who was just four, clung toddling to her skirt. Thus Poppy set forth, pushing the pram before her.

"And mind you bring them in before sun-down, and don't let them sit on the damp grass—" was Mrs. Kennedy's last word shouted up the street after the procession.

A little lane lined with syringa trees led from the house and was shady and sweet to loiter in, but Fountain Street glared and blazed under the afternoon sun. Poppy was pale and sadly-coloured as some strange cellar-plant when at last she brought her charges to a halt by the Kopje. She put Bobby down from her hip with a bump, tilted the pram and let Tommy scramble out the best way he could, then sat down on a rock and covered her face with her hands.

Bobby was a heavy-weight, and though she changed him from one hip to another all the way up the street, she[8] never got to the Kopje without a pain in her stomach and a feeling of deathly sickness.

Nearly all the children of the town came to the Kopje in the afternoons. It was only a slight hill, but it had bushes and clumps of mimosa trees, and little quarried-out holes and masses of rocks, and other fascinating features dear to children. The Kaffir-girl nurses squatted under the trees jabbering amongst themselves, and the children congregated in small herds. Poppy was the only white-girl nurse to be seen. She had a little circle of trees and stones where she always took her brood, and if she found anyone else in possession, she threw stones at them until they retreated.

When she had spread a rug for them to sit on, the children were left to amuse themselves in whatsoever fashion seemed good unto them. Poppy sat dreaming to herself, wrapped in the veils of poetry and romance. Near the Kopje was St. Michael's, a high school for girls kept by an English sisterhood, and when Poppy and her brood reached their haunt before three o'clock, she would see all the girls coming out of the gates, passing by in their nice dresses and hats with bags of books in their hands. They would stare at Poppy, and sometimes laugh; then the pain in her stomach would come into her throat and almost choke her. No one ever spoke to her. They knew quite well who she was, but she did Kaffir's work, and her clothes were old and ugly, and she was altogether a person to be despised and laughed at.

But sometimes a little ray of human friendliness would break through the hedge of snobbery. On this summer day a girl called Edie Wyllie, who used to sit next to her in Sunday-school, called out in quite a jolly way as she passed:

"Hullo, Poppy Destin!"

But her sister pulled at her arm at once and rebuked her.[9]

"Edie! You know mother doesn't let us speak to Poppy Destin."

"Pooh!" called out Poppy with the utmost scorn and derision. "Who wants to speak to you? I hate you."

She made fearful faces at them; but when they had all gone past, she rocked on her stone and wept.

"I hate them! I hate them!" she sobbed. "And I hate God! God is a beast."

Ina stood by and listened, with her pinafore in her mouth.

"I'll tell mother that, what you say," she remarked gravely.

"'Tell-tale-tit, your tongue shall be slit.' Go away from me, else I'll beat you," shouted Poppy, and Ina ran for her life and hid behind some rocks. Poppy continued her weeping, dry-eyed now, but sobbing spasmodically.

Suddenly a voice behind her!

"What's the matter little girl?"

Turning round she saw that the beauteous lady in the holland dress was sitting on a stone opposite her, smiling kindly. Her hair was like sovereigns shining in the sunlight, Poppy thought.

"Do tell me what is the matter!"

"Nothing's the matter," said Poppy defiantly.

The lady laughed long and merrily as though she found something refreshing in the child's sulky misery.

"Well, but how silly of you to cry and make your eyes red for nothing! You've got such pretty eyes, too!"

Poppy stared at her, gasping.

"Oh! If I only thought I had pretty eyes—" she said breathlessly.

"Well, you have indeed. And they are most uncommon too—just the colour of lilac, and 'put in with a smutty finger' like an Irish girl's. Are you Irish?"

Poppy was about to inform her that she was a Fenian, but she thought better of it.[10]

"I was born here in Bloemfontein," she answered.

"Well, perhaps your mother came from Ireland, for you have quite an Irish face: only you're so thin, and you look so cross—are you?"

"Yes. I am always cross. I hate everybody."

"Good heavens! What a little savage! but you shouldn't. It makes one so ugly to hate."

"Does it?" Eagerly. "Do you think if I was never cross I'd get beautiful?"

"You are much more likely to," said the other encouragingly, thinking in the meantime that nothing could ever make harmonious and beautiful that small tormented face.

"Is that why you are so beautiful?" was the next question.

The beauty smiled: a little complacently perhaps.

"I expect so. I am never cross and never unhappy, and I never mean to let anyone make me so." She opened her brown holland sunshade lined with sea-green silk and got up to go.

"Now be sure and remember that," she said pleasantly. "Never cry, never be unhappy, never hate anyone, and never be cross and—you'll see how beautiful you'll become."

"Oh, I will, I will," cried Poppy ardently.

"Now I must go," said the beautiful one. "I want to take one last walk round your pretty Bloemfontein, because I am going back to Cape Town to-morrow."

"Have you any little girls in Cape Town?" asked Poppy, wishing to detain her a little longer. She laughed at that.

"You funny child! Why I'm not even married. But I'm going to be, and to the most fascinating man in Africa."

"Is his name Lancelot?"

"No. His name is Nick Capron. How old are you, child?"

"Nine."[11]

"Only nine! You look about thirteen, you poor little thing. Well, good-bye, I must really go."

"Good-bye; and thank you so much for speaking to me," Poppy stammered. She felt that she could adore the beautiful study in brown holland, who only laughed at her again and went on her way.

But Poppy, sitting on her rock had a gleam of hope and happiness; for at last she knew the secret of being beautiful; and—it had been told her—her eyes were pretty.

She sat thinking for a long time and making resolutions. She even determined to strive to hate Aunt Lena less. Minor resolutions were—not to be unkind to the children when they made her angry and told tales on her; not to quarrel with her two elder cousins, Clara and Emily; not to scratch them and beat them with her fists when they called her Foelstruis,[1] because her legs were so long and thin; not to fly into awful rages in which she could not speak, only shake all over and bite her hands and lips till the blood came; not to sit and think of Aunt Lena's ways until a red curtain came down before her eyes and her heart felt like a red-hot coal burning her to death.

[1] Ostrich.

These were a few of the terrible obstacles in the path to beauty which she set herself to overcome. There were other arts, too, she would practise to the same end. She would brush her hair until it sprang into waves, even as the hair of the beautiful one in brown. She would cut her eyelashes, as Clara did, to make them thick and long. She would run and jump, even when she was tired, to make her body strong and her cheeks pink. She would walk upright, even when she had the pain in her stomach, so that she might grow tall and graceful. Furthermore, she would find out from old Sara where that wonderful milky cactus grew, which the young Basuto girls gathered and [12]rubbed upon their breasts in the moonlight to make them grow round and firm as young apples.

Last, but most important of all, she evolved from her dreamings and devisings a promise to herself that she would never, never do mean things, for meanness she surely knew to be the friend of hideousness. Meanness showed in the face. Could not anyone see it in Aunt Lena's face? The traces of mean thoughts and deeds showed in the narrow space between her eyebrows, in the specks in her pale eyes, were brushed into her sleek, putty-coloured hair and crinkled her coarse thick hands. If you only looked at the freckles and loose skin all round her wrists, her fat fingers and the way her ears stuck out, you must see how cruel and hateful she could be, thought Poppy. Whereupon, forgetting the greatest of her resolutions in a moment, she fell to hating her Aunt Lena again with a particular malignancy. But presently she noticed that the trees were casting long giant shadows towards the town, pansy-coloured clouds were in the sky, and a certain dewiness had come into the air. Hastily collecting the children she departed with them. In the same order as they came,

they returned home down the long white street.

But it was hard in the house of Aunt Lena Kennedy to attain beauty through virtue.

On Saturdays Poppy even forgot that she had ever made resolutions to that end. Upon that day of days, Mrs. Kennedy subjected her house and all that therein was to a scrubbing in which there was no niggardliness of what she termed "elbow grease." Poppy was not exempt; her turn came at ten o'clock at night; and that was the hour of shame and rage for Poppy. When all the rest of the children were comfortably in bed, sucking their weekly supply of lekkers, Mrs. Kennedy would roll up her sleeves and approach in a workmanlike manner the big pan-bath[13] in the middle of the kitchen, wherein stood Poppy, lank, thin-limbed, and trembling—but not with cold—under the scrutiny of the speckled eyes she hated so well.

"Ah! you bad-tempered little cat!" was the usual preliminary; "why can't you be grateful to me for taking the trouble to keep you clean? It isn't every aunt by marriage who would do it, I can tell you. I suppose you'd like to go about with the dirt ingrained in you! What are you shivering and cringing like that for? Are you ashamed of your own body?"

"It is horrible to be naked, aunt," she would retort, striving to keep tears from bursting forth and full of apprehension that someone might come into the wide-open kitchen doors.

"Horrible! what's horrible about it, I'd like to know, except in your own nasty little mind? A body like a spring-kaan,[2] that's what you've got ... and don't want me to see it, I suppose! Dirty pride! the ugliest child I've ever seen ... the longest legs ... and the skinniest arms ... look what nice fat arms Clara and Emily's got! ... one would think you never got enough to eat ... pass me that other arm."

[2] Grasshopper.

With a rough flannel and blue mottled soap she scoured Poppy's body and face as if it had been the face of a rock; scrubbing and rubbing until the skin crackled like a fire beneath her vigorous hand. Later came a scraping down with a bath towel made of something of the same fibre as a door-mat. At last Poppy crept to her bed, her eyes like pin-points in her head from the scalding of the strong soap; her hair strained back from her sore, glazed face and plaited as tightly as possible into two pig-tails behind her ears.

On such nights she was far enough from the beauty she so much coveted. To herself she appeared hideous[14]—hideous. It gave her pain to look at herself in the glass. And she believed that her aunt made her hideous with malignant intent. Her cousins had their hair loosely plaited, and it hung nicely over their faces, and they had frills to their nightgowns. Poppy's nightgown of unbleached calico had a tight narrow neck-band that nearly strangled her when buttoned with a linen button the size of a small saucer.