Sunset at Sheba by John Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

round a hitching post, flapping at the afternoon flies with their tails, while in the shade a couple of seconded Army Service Corps mechanics tinkered with the engine of a big Rolls-Royce, a lean-looking vehicle, painted brown and stripped of unnecessary fittings to make room for racks for petrol cans.
    For the rest, the street was empty, silent and still in the afternoon sun, only the long-drawn-out hiss of a standing engine beyond the sheds disturbing the silence.
    Polly stared at the flat-fronted shabby buildings in dismay. ‘I didn’t know it was like this,’ she said. ‘A girl couldn’t pick up much here.’
    She was caught by a sudden resentment, and went on in a beaten disconsolate tone. ‘Why we’ve got to get out of Plummerton just because they want us out, I dunno,’ she said bitterly, feeling rootless and adrift suddenly as she thought of the sparse comfort of the rooms behind Buiderkant Street she had left behind and the few belongings she had given up because she couldn’t pack them. There hadn’t been much, just a roomy bedchamber with red curtains and cheap gaudy wallpaper fly-spotted round the light, a chest of drawers, some without knobs, a greenish looking-glass and a brass-knobbed iron bedstead with a turkey twill cover - and an American-cloth armchair set by the window where you could watch the traffic and the people. But outside there was a white-painted fence which made it look like home and a couple of white-washed drainpipes overflowing with Indian cress, set on either side of the gate under the dusty pepper trees.
    Not much, she thought again, but there must have been something about it to attract people because they always came - and not always because she had the sort of figure that whetted their appetites. Sometimes they came - Winter among them, she thought bitterly, as she considered how he had ranged himself against her now - merely to sit and drink with her, satisfied simply to be with a woman who was kind and thought about their comfort without making demands on them.
    As she sank into her own private reverie, Sammy said nothing, and the cart rattled slowly past the crates of machinery, the sacks of flour stacked outside the office of the forwarding agents bearing the inevitable name of Plummer, a musty place with an odour that was a strange compound of tea and green coffee, of ropes and saddles and sides of leather, the saltiness of bacon and the sharp metallic tang of hardware, all larded with the strong chemical odour of sheep-dip.
    ‘We’re getting out because they’ve got all the money, Poll,’ Sammy said slowly at last. ‘This is all theirs - every last bit of it. They’ve got the power and the say-so. People like you and me have to do as we’re told.’ He became silent again, not resentful in spite of his words, as though in his world the weakest had always gone to the wall without complaining.
    They were moving up the main street now, past a waiting tram, whose horses dozed in the sun, its coloured driver silent and huddled in one of the seats. The sun was past its zenith but fiercer than ever, so that the sky paled and the dust hung motionless in the air, and the heat drew all the vitality out of the land, squeezing out the marrow from the bones of the earth and leaving behind only the vast empty husk of the African afternoon.
    Polly stared about her and at the men lounging along the front of the hotel.
    ‘Sammy,’ she said, a doubtful worried note in her voice, ‘I don’t like the look of this place. I want to go to Kimberley.’
    He turned to her, his face blank, his flat light eyes unemotional. ‘There’s no train for a while,’ he said.
    She smiled at him, wheedling, her mercurial Irish good humour returning. ‘You could take me, Sammy.’
    ‘Me?’ He stared at her, his eyes wide at last in the shadow of his hat.
    ‘Why not?’
    He scowled, resisting her blandishments. ‘Because I’m not going to Kimberley -- that’s why not.’
    Polly put on an act