He gazed before him as he walked, at the house, with its kraals clustered before it and its humble appanage of out-buildings, with a gentle indulgence for all its primitive and domestic quality. Meals and a bed were what they stood for, merely the raw framework of intelligent life, needing to be supplemented and filled in with more stimulating accessories. They satisfied only the immediate needs of a man adrift and hungry; they offered nothing to compensate a lively mind for its exile from the fervor of the world. Fifty pounds, the fine round sum, not alone made him independent of its table and its roof, but opened afresh the way to streets and lamplight, to the native heath of the wandering Bailey, who knew his fellow men from above and below--Kafirs, for instance, he saw from an altitude--but had few such opportunities as this of meeting them on a level of economic equality. There came to him, as he dwelt in thought upon his good fortune, a clamorous appetite for what fifty pounds would buy. Capetown was within his reach, and he recalled small hotels on steep streets, whose back windows looked forth on flat roofs of Malay houses, where smells of cooking and people loaded the sophisticated air and there was generally a woman weeping and always a man drunk. A little bedroom with an untidy bed and beer bottles cooling in the wash-hand basin by day; saloons where the afternoon sun came slanting upon furtive men initiating the day's activities over glasses; the electric-lit night of Adderley Street under the big plate-glass windows, where business was finished for the shops and offices and newly begun for the traders in weakness and innocence--he knew himself in such surroundings as these. He could slip into them as noiselessly as a snake into a pool, with no disturbance to those inscrutable devotees of daylight and industry who carry on their plain affairs and downright transactions without suspecting the existence of the world beneath them, where Boy Bailey and his fellows stir and dodge and hide and have no illusions, save that hunger is ever fed or thirst quenched.
He paused at the open door of the farmhouse, recalled to the present by the sound of voices from the kitchen at the end of the passage, where Christian du Preez and his wife were engaged in bitter talk. Boy Bailey stepped delicately over the doorstep on to the mat within and stood there to listen, if there should be anything worth listening to. A smile played over his large complacent features, and he waited with his head cocked to one side. Something in which the word "tramp" occurred as he came through the door flattered him with the knowledge that the dispute was about himself.