Chapter IV: Vicisti Galilaee! (2)

The dawn had come ere he had roused himself again. It was good to find that the rain was over and the night gone, and that the fire was blazing. His carriers were chafing their hands and feet. His sleeping host bulked still as a molded shape in the buck-sail. Had he moved at all since last night? The big black-and-white and red-and-white oxen were tethered still. Would their wardens ever wake up and see them fed? The carriers tied up his packs, and moved forward with a swing. Still there was no sign from the buck-sail, boy and master alike were still within, though the sun had climbed over the hills. Hood shrugged his shoulders, and moved off down the west road. He left that little mystery, as he had left bigger riddles in Africa, utterly unsolved.

Soon they dried themselves at a hospitable hut-fire in a village. It was Lady Day. Hood noted the seasonable blue-and-white of his blanket as he hung it on a rafter. He made the morning Offering behind that vaporous screen. Then they ate their food, and drugged themselves belatedly with quinine against those perils of the night.

Hood for one felt cheerily defiant, if somewhat stiff from long bathing. 'This is life,' he thought as the sun came out, and they strode mile after mile down the valley. Afterwards came the shining drift, and the last climb up to the Station.

When Hood reached Capetown, he found a letter awaiting him. His chosen traveling companion an explorer was delayed up-country. Hood was sorry to get that letter. Then the possibilities of a lonely journey struck him. He revived the remembrances of long-room life as an under-schoolboy. He took an open berth for a three weeks' voyage. Whereas, in the English public school he had gone to, Gentiles had been many and Jews the exception, the balance was now redressed.

It was a good time on the whole that he had on this voyage, but he was glad indeed to be out of the boat and in England once more, his own South-country England! The spring and early summer were kind to Hood, then July came and brought the gathering in Berkshire. All the old forgatherers of five years ago were there, all but that one they had left behind in Africa. He had gone to sleep there, three long years ago in the past.

'How I do miss Hunter!' confided the explorer to Hood. 'They seem to have aged a lot, some of the others,' he explained forlornly.

Hood stared at him as he steered their boat down the river. He reflected.

'I think you're right,' he said. 'But you haven't aged a bit. Nor have I. Nor has our host so very much. That's how the dividing line comes in. The others are all married, much married, and like their little comforts.'

'You're right there,' said the explorer, disconsolately. 'A bread-and-cheese lunch in a bar parlor and a twenty-mile walk didn't suit Warner. He used not to be like that. If only he'd kept out in Africa after the war.'

'Warner's better than somebody we both know,' grumbled Hood. 'Having a car of his own hasn't made him any younger.'

'Never mind,' the explorer said, 'there's two of us out in Africa yet, and not likely to marry. There used to be three, usedn't there?'

'I do wish we had one to spare,' said Hood. 'It'd be rather a tragedy for the other one if one of us two deserted. But you'll try not, won't you, and I'll try too.'

While they stayed with their bachelor host, friends of his, married and single alike, were very kind to them. The rector, who had only come last year, asked them to make themselves at home in his garden. It had a blaze of civilization in its front borders, now, but at the back of the house it was rather wild and very shady. The rector's youngest sister, Perpetua, kept house for him, a girl whose English coloring took a pretty and subdued form; Hood and the explorer were much interested in her romance. The curate, Warner said, was her continual worshipper. He was a keen sort of curate that.

She had been kind to him till quite recently. Now she was uninterested, or seemed so.

The Good-bye of the reunion came round, but the explorer and Hood went not with the others. The married guests went off to their home comforts, but these two stayed on for at least a week more. They became fast friends with both Perpetua and the curate, but they found it best for social joy not to mix them.

Perpetua shared a sailing expedition with the strangers. Therein they explored much of the Evenlode, the hay-harvest breeze favoring them. Another day she went with them afoot to the Hinkseys. Certain moot points of poetic identification were hardly settled by that trip, so another followed. They came home by Cumner both days.

'She would do for Africa,' confided the explorer to Hood one night. The village band had been playing, and they had thought no scorn of it. The groups under the dreaming garden trees, and the full moon, and the white evening-star' had been memorable that evening.

'She might do for Africa,' said Hood doubtfully, 'but I wouldn't let her go and spoil her complexion.'

'If you were the curate?' asked the explorer with a smile.

'What's he to do with it?' said Hood impatiently. 'Didn't he almost promise he'd sail with me in two months' time? I want him for work.'

'That's too bad,' said the explorer; 'cut that labor-agent business. Let him stay at home and marry Perpetua. There's a family living waiting for him across the river. Won't they be happy just?'

'I don't know,' said Hood, thinking fast.

Next morning the explorer had a touch of fever. The village doctor dropped in as an anxious friend. He mustered up his courage to prescribe two grains of quinine. His patient smiled, and promised to take them with additions. Then he went to sleep, and left Hood to escort Perpetua to Bab-lock-hythe. She was adventurous that afternoon. 'She has outgrown the curate,' Hood thought. The explorer's words recurred to him: 'She might do for Africa.' 'Not if I know it,' he answered them in his own mind.

His interest in her grew that day, and the next day, when the explorer was convalescent. The day after that he said 'Good-bye,' and escorted the convalescent to Oxford.

'Good luck!' said the explorer as they parted near the Martyrs' Memorial, each bound for his own college. 'Let's stick to our own way of life, we two. Don't let's get middle-aged just yet, like Warner and Davies. And, mind, drop that agency rot, and leave the curate to Perpetua. They're just the age she twenty, he twenty-five. You, who're forty-one, have pity!'

That evening Hood smoked his pipe in a college garden. One who had taught him years ago was there. Hood was fairly candid as to his real thoughts when he talked to him. He was telling the tale of that rainy night, as the summer twilight darkened, 'I'm just forty,' he said. 'It seems as if I could hold my own a bit with younger men, D.G.!'

His friend looked at him thoughtfully. 'It's fictitious youth, he said. 'Supposing you were to try marrying and settling down. Supposing you were to try deserting your perennially youthful bride the Great Adventure, or the High Romance, or the New Jerusalem, or whatsoever you call her. Supposing you settle down with an earthly bride say, a sweet-and-twenty one! Supposing you had to toe the line of four-meals-a-day in a country vicarage. You would know your age then.'

Hood looked uninterested and aloof. But he recurred to the subject again later on, and he asked whether a certain living in the near neighborhood had been filled.

'No,' said his friend; do you want it?'

Hood flushed up. 'It's the sort of place I'd like to settle down in,' he said, 'if I were coming home. But why should I come?'

His friend made no answer at once. The same sort of wistful look came into his eyes that Hood had noticed in the explorer's eyes that afternoon.

'Why should you not?' he said at last. 'Yet I for one would like you not to renounce the perpetually juvenile lady. I'm not in a hurry to see the last of your glad, perennial youth.'

That night Hood lay in his friend's spare room, looking out over the Gardens. He was reading in bed a college list. It had pencil notes of the deaths or careers of some contemporaries. Rousing himself from his researches, he sprang up and put the book away. He leaned down to the window-shelf. What was that book with the stained red cover! He remembered a romance that had come out in his college days of twenty years ago, a book by one who had had his own rooms before him. He took it back to bed with him, and turned over the pages. At last he found the lyric he sought. One of its verses held the tag he had remembered so often, but had forgotten, and wanted that evening, wanted to confirm his own halting decision:

'In a wife's lap, as in a grave, Man's airy notions mix with earth.'

He put down the book and switched off the electric light. He lay a long while in the moonlight, thinking himself far away to earthen walls and guttering candles. He thought of the chill penury of lack of blankets that he had known in winter. Also of the sun's summer glare on white wagon-roads and Kaffir paths. What wonder that wayfarers' eyes amass many wrinkles around them? Yet how young one had kept after all; and at what speed one would age here with electric light and sheets and a stately dinner to tempt one! 'Man's airy notions.' Yes, he had got some very airy notions still, whereof the earth was not worthy. Getting old didn't matter, of course, so much; but he wanted to stick to doing his own work (his Lord's work) in his own way. He didn't want to leave like-minded friends in the lurch either. Nor did he see his way to hug the shore at home with Perpetua, while the curate braved the 'foam of perilous seas.' Would he ever have the heart to watch her fresh face spoiling in Africa? Could he bear to see it wizened and withered in the Tropic of Capricorn? No!

He was soon asleep.

His first waking knowledge was of his friend's asking him the question, 'Are you going to apply for that living?' He had his 'No!' ready from that last night.

'I'm glad,' his friend said. '"Fly our paths, our feverish contact fly!" I'd like you to take my advice and be happy yes, and useful as well as youthful.'

'All right,' smiled Hood from his pillow. 'I mean sailing next month.'

He went to his home in Kent that same day, and rejoiced in the Weald. His sister and he made a pilgrimage to Canterbury before the month was over, from Sevenoaks by way of the Downs.

'This was where Marlowe went to school,' she reminded him. 'I think he might have been almost as great as Shakespeare, don't you?'

'I don't know,' Hood answered. 'He was a different sort. I can't imagine him settled down in middle age at Canterbury like Shakespeare at Stratford. "His raptures were all air and fire." His airy notions refused to mix with earth somehow.'

The conversation was not very important, but it showed the continuing trend of Hood's purpose. He hardened his heart and went to the Upper River no more ere his sailing from Southampton, nor did he press the curate to sail with him. The latter wrote him a very dubious letter. He would make no promises about work in Africa now. Hood gathered that Perpetua was relenting.

The explorer sailed with him, to his joy, instead of the curate. They went up from Capetown in continuing amity together. At last they parted far upcountry. Hood went on his lonely way, not without some retrospects and some doubts as to his decision.

At a roadside station a well-tried comrade came to greet him. This friend had married last year, and his wife was donkey-riding and foot-faring with him. They were but just back from many miles in very wild country. Seven carriers were with them.

'Heavy loads!' said Hood, shaking his head. 'So you carry chairs and a table into the Veld?'

'Home comforts,' growled his fellow-missionary. 'Why not be comfortable? And why, too, didn't you bring a wife back? Some one said.'

Hood smiled, and the missionary's wife smiled back at him. 'He's better as he is, dear,' said she to her grunting husband. 'He's a foot-slogging free-lance. We're the household heavy cavalry. He's different.'

'Wait and see if he remains so,' rejoined her husband solemnly. Then the train screamed and went off.

Soon Hood was landing at his own rail-head and receiving the greetings of many brown people. They seemed glad to see him as he straggled back so forlornly to them up the platform, and out of the station. His holiday was done.

But he was soon forlorn no longer. They had so many delights and anxieties to share with him his traveling comrades. Soon they were striding away far up the remembered road together. They were through the drift. How low it was now in this droughty time. Then they wound along the valley. Hood peered curiously among the ruddy-leaved bushes as they came round the shoulder of a hill. Was the silent teamster still outspanned there? No, he was not there to make them welcome, or to sleep away the tyranny of their presence. He had fled their 4 greetings, fled their speech and smiles.' Never mind. If the road was lonely, Spring was in the land. How the trees and the bushes glowed! 'Surely no man ever in a land of exile found more of a warmth of welcome home!' he thought to himself.

It was on Christmas Day (last Christmas Day) that, Hood tells me, a momentous letter came to hand. It was from Berkshire, and he did not read it till the time came for him to turn towards his veld-home. He had held Christmas services in various places.

He was now looking forward to a rest and to supper-time. He was sitting outside a wayside school as he read that letter. Some Mashona children had brought him clay figures as Christmas presents. They graced the grey rock beside him one big figure and a little figure or two in clay skirts, also a quaint version of a perambulator. They showed up rather drably against the glory of Western sun and blue sky.

The letter announced Perpetua's plighted troth. It was from the curate. He added that they were both looking forward to settling down shortly in the family living. They might be married in April or in June. Hood smiled and lit his pipe resignedly.

'So his airy notions of Africa are mixed with earth,' he thought, 'honest Berkshire earth, hurst sand, or down chalk, I suppose. No, I'm forgetting. That rectory's across the river in Bucks or Oxon, I forget which. Anyhow the earth's got the better of the air, and it's arranged that Africa's not to see him.' His eyes fell upon the clay family grouped beside him. 'It's good Perpetua's having a home and a family in prospect,' he thought. 'One understands that there's a good deal to be said for such things when Christmas comes round, at any rate.'

Some words came into his head, words of his favorite poet weren't they? 'I hope I shall never marry; the roaring wind is my wife, and the stars through the window-panes are my children: the mighty abstract idea of beauty I have in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness.' He looked at those clay grotesques rather tenderly. He was thinking of a story in a life of St. Francis he had read only yesterday, how he had made him figures of snow and called them in irony his wife and children and servants. 'Here is thy wife, these are thy sons and daughters, the other two are thy servant and thy handmaid; and for all these thou art bound to provide. But if the care of so many trouble thee, be thou careful to serve one Lord alone.'

He said over to himself those unforgotten words, sadly rather than scornfully this time:

'In a wife's lap, as in a grave, Man's airy notions mix with earth.'

He shouldered his knapsack. Then he commended the clay figures to their donors; he asked them if they would mind looking after them. He was very grateful; he would have them kept in the school to remind him of things that earthy little family of his own.

Then airily and fierily he splashed away down the path for home. Through the marshland he went, and down towards the stream. He forded the wagon-torn drift eagerly, climbed up out of it, and strode away beyond.

How young and fresh he felt as he went away again on his campaign with earth and water! How air and fire subdued their sister elements to themselves!

PISGAH

We had been going sixteen days on the home course to England, and I had come to know him fairly well. He was a seaman who had sailed the self-same mail-boat for some years past. I remembered him on a brighter trip in summer-time when I was a good deal younger and took the languors of the voyage less slumberously. Now it was winter-time on the home-side of the Line, and I was sailing under a cloud of news grave and stern. So I was rather prone to see most things as much alike in a sort of dream of neutral colors. My seafaring friend had helped me in the sultry nights further south, had shown me a sleeping place high up among the ropes, had called me in the grey dawn, or warned me when lightning flashed and it seemed that a downpour threatened. Afterwards we had passed Madeira, a cheering vista with its white walls and red roofs and purple bougainvillea, and settled down into wintry weather and storm-vexed seas. Now the last night up the Channel had come, and the weather was calmer. We had seen the scowling Ushant coast in the sun and shower of an icy mid-day. So we were looking for a light to show very soon now an English light, a Dorset light and the pulse of our chill quickened to racing rhythm. 'How many voyages have you made before this one?' I asked my friend as we leant over a rail together. He mentioned an astonishing number. 'You must know a lot about the things that I want to know' I said, 'the going to and fro of people, their starting out and their coming back again. Doesn't it all seem pretty stale to you by now?' 'No,' he said; 'it's my living, and besides that it interests me watching the game. It's an interesting bit of the game that I see, don't you think, sir, coming to the fringes of two Promised Lands, and not tackling the job of settling down in either? I've got interests, though, in both of them.' He was silent, and we both filled our pipes again. This friend of mine interested me: his reading tastes had surprised me: he borrowed Mr. Masefield's works and Miss Olive Schreiner's, but I had not often found him communicative till that last night before reaching home. 'I'm better where I am earning a sure living,' he went on. 'I've got a boy put to school at Southampton; no, not mine I'm not married. But he's staying at school a long while. I don't particularly want him to go out to South Africa, speaking for myself. His father didn't do particularly well there as people reckon, but yet I don't know. He enjoyed his life in his own way, I think. I saw enough of him to understand that, and the boy seems bound to go back there: bound or tied's the very word. He was born up the country, and carried on a Kaffir woman's back in her goatskin, and knew more Kaffir than English, and wore veld-schoen when he came back on the boat with me.' 'When was that?' I asked. 'When his father, Walter Holmes, came aboard seven years ago come this next March. That was the second time his father traveled with me. He came on before, fifteen years earlier, when first he traveled to Africa, and I remembered him well enough. I was on the old boat. I've only served on the two boats all my time.' 'What did he go out to do?' I asked. 'Oh! he went up to join the pioneers at Kimberley. A counter-jumper he'd been, and he'd got his head all stuffed full. It was 1890, one of Rhodes' big years, the year they went north. It would have done you good to hear him talk. He was so keen, and his eyes glowed. Just like the water glows near the keel in the tropics.' 'That must have been a time,' I said; 'I've only read about it. It was before I saw the country.' The sailor grinned and spat. 'I reckon there hadn't been better days for young fellows to live in,' he said, 'not since Queen Elizabeth's reign. It came just between the two Jubilees the time. Kimberley and Rhodesia and the native wars and the Raid, and the big war looming on ahead for by and by. I reckon it was something like it was in Drake's and Hawkins' and Sir Walter's days.' That was a new view to me. But it sounded likely enough to hear him bring it out, who believed in it so evidently. 'It was all Ophir and El Dorado,' he went on; 'I used to hear lots of it from people to and fro. I'd see them going out to Africa and all the excitement after the lagging times along the coast, when they came with the dawn into Table Bay. I'd see them coming back, too, greedy enough to see Portland Light then, like that stout party over there.' He pointed to a paunchy miner who was flinging his leather cap up. 'He's seen it,' he said; 'yes, look there! One! Two! Three! 'Four!'

My own eyes glowed and my heart hopped up and down. Yonder was a verity of England once more after years of absence. People came along to our corner of the deck and questioned and stared and laughed to one another. 'But I want to hear the end of that story,' I said, and I enticed him away with me past the wheel-house to a place far out of the talk and the tramping up and down. 'How used the people to come back, did you say?' I asked him. 'Oh! some had done fairly well,' he said, 'and some were broken, but it was good to see how slow they found the boat go, getting back again, and how they hung on the lights.' 'Yet they didn't stay long in England some of them?' I hazarded. 'No,' he said; 'I'd see some coming back, and hear of lots more. The same thing over again it would seem when we came into Table Bay, only they were a bit older.' 'But some didn't come home to England, did they?' I wanted him to tell me. 'No,' he said; 'you're right there no doubt. This friend of mine named Holmes took a long time coming. But I heard from him sometimes when he was up country. He found the business of settling Canaan rough, I gathered. I think I'm glad I heard about it from a distance. It mightn't have suited me.' 'And he got married up there, did you say?' 'Yes, his girl came out on this ship when he'd been out seven years or so. He used to write to me sometimes, and he arranged about the boat she came by. She was full of the farm she was going to; he had written about it. She seemed to think that it was a regular Kentish homestead. She wrote afterwards and thanked me for looking after her on the voyage, and said she had found two huts on a kopje when she got there. All their cattle died when her boy was about six years old. Then she died. Holmes had a lot of trouble that year. So he sold up and came on board the year after. Waited for my boat, worse luck, and contracted enteric in Cape Town. I thought we should lose him off Cape Verde. But it wasn't a clammy night the night we passed the wind blew fresh and we got him by. How he longed for home, for settling down in Kent. Rhodesia was all very well when one was young, he had said. She hadn't treated him so very well, but she had taught him to value things at home. I thought we might land him home after all, when we were a whole day or so past Cape Verde. But that night a change came and he was gone. We dropped him over at sunrise, only four or five hours after, so as not to cast a gloom over the passengers, you understand.' 'And you took on his child?' I asked. 'Yes, and wanted him to settle down in the south country. No, not Africa Kent I mean. I thought I'd settle down with him in the better of my two countries. For it is the better. I who've looked down at both, like Moses on the mountain, have found out that much. But it doesn't look a bit now as if he'll believe in my advice.' 'And if he goes out, you'll follow him?' I questioned. He smiled. 'I think I'll be simple enough for it,' he said; 'I seem to want to renew my youth. I somehow used to be sorry I missed my chance to follow his father up. Now that generation's about gone the generation of King Solomon's Mines. It doesn't seem like putting myself forward so much if the boy himself asks me to come up with him, does it, sir?' 'And you want to go.' 'Well if you look over Moses' Moabitish mountain long enough, at a promised land, so to speak, you may get a hankering to go in,' he said. 'It's not a better country. It's not a heavenly; I don't make any mistake about that. But it's a country that people have thought big things about, if they have carried them out badly. I seem to have seen something of the right and the wrong of it all these nights coming north to Southampton Water or south into Table Bay.' 'And what's the conclusion of the whole matter?' I said. We were almost alone on the deck now. (There was just one lonely, lanky passenger strolling up and down. I guessed that the rest were in bed, or going to bed or having a last drink below. We went down the deck together and took our stand behind that forsaken watcher of the shore-light. He stood at gaze, pulling deeply from his pipe and drinking in the four-a-time flashes with owlish contentment.) 'Oh! the conclusion's what Solomon said right enough,' he muttered. 'Fear and keep, and keep and fear. Perhaps he'd been out and visited the men on his mines up-country.' He paused. I seemed to hear the jingling of bar-glasses in a back-veld canteen as he did so. The thud of drums, too, from Kaffir villages seemed to bear down on us. The Channel breeze came to me as it were heavily laden with the sounding challenges of the South. 'I suppose,' I said, 'it makes a big difference when one loses the northern star. Those southern skies painted with unnumbered sparks are all very well, but one lacks the pole-star of honor one steered by in England.' 'Yes,' he said, 'It's there I reckon the Southern Cross comes in, and people going south make a mistake not to notice it. When one's out of sight of the old compass-point of English opinion one feels the want of believing, if one's to make any sort of a show. It's a bad look-out if, when one lives under the Southern Cross, one can't understand it. Fear God and keep His Commandments. Do you think God would have put that cluster of stars to south if the South did not need it most?'

A LION IN THE WAY*

* This tale may seem obscure, I suppose, if read in modern English. It may be interpreted in the light of two ideas:

(1) The African idea about leanthropy or transmutation of man into lion, an idea likely to linger on, I should think.

(2) An idea prevalent as it seems in our Europe of old '. . . the idea that when a witch in animal form is wounded, say by a blow or a shot, the natural wound will appear on the human body when the witch returns to her own person.'

But I have topsy-turvied (2) in my tale. A.S.C.

I saw the lion with my own eyes, his shaggy head haloed by the rising moon. The Mashona who was with me had far sharper eyes than mine. He saw a dark scar across its brow. He would know that lion again, he told me. It was not a gun-shot wound it carried. Surely it was the caress of a brother lion.

The trader's road led down from the half-deserted kraal to the drift. It forked into two wagon ways with a huge rock to part them. There on the rock stood the lion expectant. That may not be a heraldic term, but it is a true description of him as I saw him. We watched him from the height above for what seemed a longish time.

Then in haste I stole back to the desolate kraal that I might find Trooper No. 2. Had he not the chance of his life now to shoot a lion? I found him in the kraal, angry with himself and swearing at his Black Watch boy who suffered him silently. While he swore at him I gave him some idea of what I was thinking, as to his need of humility. Had I not seen him run ten minutes before? All this took time. When at last his flow of words dried up and he came with me, we were too late. The lion was no longer against the sky-line. He had taken cover in the bush below. We heard him there once or twice, but we saw him no more. This is how these things came about.

I had traveled into that forlorn country the day before, looking for Carrot. He had been a pioneer and a reputed hero, not so many years gone past. Now he was an Ishmael, receding and receding before the tide of civilization. Like the eagle in Byron's lines on Kirke White, he might blame himself, or at any rate credit himself, for the turn things had taken. He had winged the shaft that was draining his life, or at least his livelihood. He had helped to bring on a native war that had expedited matters. He had helped to wind it up in a very few months.

So now the abomination of civilization, as he deemed it, was set up in high places of the land. It was increasingly hard for him to be a law to himself anywhere within the land's limits. He had retired further and further yet again into the fastnesses of the hill-country. Yet civilization had a graceless way of looking him up.

He was just by the Portuguese border when I visited him. I knew him of old, and I wanted him to let his eldest son come to school. He had told me a year ago to ask again.

I went through a frowning gorge of rocks to the part-deserted kraal, and found him sitting at his beer with three native courtiers. He was a tall West-countryman, with a ragged dark beard. His khaki was badly stained, and his hair was poking through his hat. He spoke the tongue of this southern country most volubly. He also reinforced it with ne'er-do-well words from Europe that did her no particular credit. Just as I came up a quarrel was in full swing. A free fight followed. Carrot broke a black earthen pot over the head of one of those three. Out came his swarthy wife that he had paid many cattle for, with his baby in a goat-skin at her back; also his other children, aged about eight, six, five, and four.

There was much confused crying and protesting. But Carrot dominated the scene in the end. The courtiers retired crying 'Shame!' and under protest. The most truculent of them was bleeding freely from his broken head. I followed him to their hamlet far down among the rocks and bandaged him. I camped outside the Carrot homestead that night and the next day, and learned something of the family's way of life.

Carrot was shooting big buck sable and roan without a license, I gathered. He was trading cattle for most of the venison that he amassed. He had by now a goodly herd feeding in a green vlei near the border. By and by he would sell them, he thought, and set himself up in a wayside public-house. That was to say, if an ungrateful Government could be squared somehow. He chuckled at my protests. He had many tales in the speech of North Devon to tell me.

Many of them concerned the police, and were not altogether unkindly, though disparaging. To Carrot, who could both ride and find his way about the veld, the police seemed often deficient as pathfinders and horsemen. The story he told about the five European members of a police camp delighted me. One had got lost. He who went out to look for him had got lost also. There was an epidemic or something of the sort just then among the native police, who, as a rule, piloted the troopers about and did nurses' work at need. One after another of the remaining three Europeans was engulfed in this exhaustive search. Then a grass fire effaced the empty police camp. Carrot ended with a speculation as to whether they were still looking for one another or whether they had begun to miss their camp yet.

He was good in a feudal way, I gathered a severely feudal way to his retainers. He threw pots but seldom. His eldest child he seemed to worship in some sort of pagan fashion of his own.

The boy might have sat for a child Dionysos with his leopard-skin, and his arm of golden copper thrown about his father's pot of beer; black and big that pot should be painted.

No, his father wouldn't let him come away with me; at least, not this year. He graciously hesitated twice or thrice. But he ended with the same proposal each time a drink and a postponement of decision. I wanted neither. I would not go on wasting my days on postponements, and I meant to start with dawn on the second morning. But at sunset the night before there had been a surprise.

Just as the sun went down a strange native appeared in hot haste and told a tale.

Two ma-Johnnies were coming down the wagon road with five or six, native police and camp-followers. The Government was looking up Carrot once again. He had had two pots of beer that afternoon, or most of them, and was not quite himself, otherwise he might have gone his way at his ease.

But as it was, a ghastly row woke the echoes, what with the children crying, and the father singing and swearing, and the mother scolding, as they tied up their bundles. Carrot kept untying his in good humor, and searching for patent medicines and a safety razor that could not be found. Then after he had started he came back at least twice to give me a parting word. Meanwhile the western glow began to be rivaled by an eastern glow. The moon was brimming over the horizon. The Philistines of civilization were almost riding into the kraal before Carrot had really gone. My Adullamite friend was slow indeed with his farewells. Would he ever be through with them? 'Good-bye!' he said. He was enjoying the emergency hugely now that he was sobered. 'You'd better walk down the road and meet 'em. Do remind 'em not to lose their mules this time. No, I won't worry you to see me off. They might ask questions. You must honor and obey the King and those who are set in authority. But you won't want to give me away exactly. So good-bye till next time!'

A hundred yards from Carrot's dwelling I met Troopers 1 and 2 Trooper No. I dusty and disheveled and livid with fever a lanky, dark man; Trooper No. 2 trim and ruddy. The former could hardly sit his mule as he trotted up to me. 'Have you seen Carrot?' he asked in a sort of groan. I said 'Good evening,' and passed on. Promptly he gasped to two native police to bring me along, and went his way forward to explore the ruinous kraal. He felt doubtful whether I was or was not Carrot, he told me afterwards. He went for the three Carrot huts at once and began to search them. There were no finds there. Then he questioned me sharply. Two of his black watch knew me by sight, and I was soon set free to go my ways. Then he gave clear decisive orders to No. 2 to ride for all he was worth to the drift. 'The river's the border,' he said; 'it's his old game to dodge across it. If he's taken his kids with him he can't cross anywhere. It's a big river, and there's only the one drift so far as I know. Go for the drift, man, and we'll have him yet!'

So Trooper No. 2, with the glory-thirst upon him, bustled off with one black boy and four black men in red and blue.

After he was safely out of the way Trooper No. I fainted. It had been hard for him to keep going so long as he had. I spread a blanket for him and made him a pillow. He was not long in coming round. Meanwhile the great moon had climbed a little. The light of the sunset was losing its brilliance as hers grew splendid.

The sound of two shots came sharply to us. A minute or so after No. 2's mule was galloping wildly past us through rocks and ruins. A native trooper rushed for it, but missed its bridle. Soon after that Trooper No. 2 galloped up on his feet. I should judge from the pace he showed that he was a real sprinter. I had noted him before as a trim little man and ruddy, and a sort of personification of self-respect. Now he was blue and demoralized.

'Have you caught my mule?' he panted anxiously.

'Have you stopped our man?' Trooper No. 1 asked him coldly, his face set very hard.

'There's a lion in the way,' gasped Trooper No. 2, quoting Scripture, whether he knew it or not. 'I got off my mule, I fired two shots. Then my mule bolted.'

'And you bolted,' said No. 1 with a sneer. He took no further notice of him, but called the Black Watch corporal and gave him his orders. 'Take three men,' he said. 'Get to the drift. Run for your lives. Leave the path and go through the bush if there's really a lion.' The four Black Watch were off almost as soon as he had spoken.

Trooper No. 2 began to explain matters at length to his senior. But the latter did not suffer him at all gladly. Then it was that I started down the drift road, asking No. 2's boy if he would show me the place where they had seen the lion. I asked him if he thought it was wounded. He answered me disdainfully. He showed me how Trooper No. 2 shot the panic way the way to heaven.

Then we came in sight of the lion standing, haloed by the disc of the moon. As I have told you, I tried to give No. 2 a chance to wipe out his stain. I went back to fetch him; he was taking things hardly, doubtless, and I ought to try and do him a good turn. He came, but the lion did not stand still to await him. Why was I so glad he escaped? I don't think it was only because I was afraid. Yet glad I was. So we gave him up, and tramped back to the kraal.

Soon after we were back one of the pursuers returned. He had seen Carrot splash through the drift. He took his time and went at it leisurely, I gathered, with his piccanin astride upon his shoulders. On the other side a crowd of natives had received him in triumph. They jeered at the police and shook their spears and knobkerries. Carrot was safely across the border and among his friends.

'It's a lost trip,' said No. 1, and looked No. 2 up and down, as we sat by the camp fire. No. 2 looked injured and ashamed at one and the same time. He was not a hero on principle, I should think, and he had not risen to this occasion. Some people seem to hold that Britishers are heroes on principle all along our frontiers, and rise to all occasions. I can testify that this is not the truth, for I know my own deficiencies. As to No. 2, there is some sort of mitigating explanation of his conduct to be yet recounted. But no, even when I have allowed for this, I am not disposed to write him down heroically efficient or journalistically British not on that night at least. Just as a Colenso now and then slips into our big campaigns, so the monotony of our frontier triumphs gets diversified, I fear, and not so very seldom. No. 2. is by no means the only man of the diversifying type I seem to have met. I refuse to admire No. 2 as he was that night, though I would excuse him.

For the hero of that night, let us look away from him. What a splendid night it was in the late autumn in the very end of May! Stars seemed to fall in profusion. But the steady ranks that were left showed no thinning to my dazzled eyes. I had much time to watch them, I remember.

Ours was a gloomy camp among the ruins under the stars. One trooper was convalescent and irritable as well as disappointed. The other was shaken and sulky with little to say. There were great pauses in the talk. I thought how I congratulated Carrot, the cheerful and irresponsible, on his escape. Assuredly his would-be captors would have seemed to him dull dogs. Of course he would have thoroughly deserved ordinary boredom. But theirs was like a London fog. So it fell about that I had much time to give heed to the Black Watch as they chattered over their fire hard by. One was telling tales of lions, tales where the terror was glamorous and ghostly. A hint of a surmise floated to me. It recalled a type of mediaeval tale that had once entranced me. But I said nothing to those young white men beside me whose frowning faces were a study, and a pitiful one. I was intensely sorry for them both. I just smoked my pipe, and made ready to go to bed betimes. I was soon asleep, to dream of holy water and silver bullets and to wake and rise as the cock was crowing (for the second cock-crow I suppose) away down the hillside; I said an added prayer of eager devotion, feeling myself to be a postulant in great need of its answer. I made for the rock of vantage. I found the lion's spoor in the growing light, and followed it slowly and timorously into the bush and beyond. There had been a shower yesterday about noon, and it was easy enough to follow it. It led down and then up again. I guessed it might be leading me to Carrot's huts and the troopers once more. But, no, it dipped far down to that other group of huts wedged amongst the rocks, where Carrot's boon comrades lived, where I had bandaged the hurt head, where I had heard but just now the cock crowing. Two huts I could see to be empty. It did not lead to either of these. It led straight to the other wherein the embers of a fire shone red. There was no lion within. I looked for the spoor of the lion's exit. There was none.

The retainer who had had his head broken by Carrot lay curled in his blanket by the fire. He was sleeping an exhausted man's sleep. It was hard work waking him. At last he sat up, a squat patriarch with grizzled bushy beard and shrewd watchful eyes. He was huddled in a queer parti-colored blanket purple and brown and orange and grey. I tried to testify to him with zeal against blackness of witchcraft. I told him with zest of the Light. He looked blank enough. Afterwards I spoke of Carrot's escape. His eyes underwent a change as I watched. The Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world, showed in them, as it seemed to me. He was genuinely glad that his baas was out of the wood. So clear an affection for the man whose mark he was wearing touched me. I half emptied my tobacco bag into his hand ere I said Good-bye in the roaring south-easter, under the saffron streamered dawn.

I surmised that Carrot owed his escape largely to a real hero ready to face fire at need, whom we white men had not recognized.

A new feeling of pity for Trooper No. 2 took me. Haply he had miscalculated things as he pursued his unsanctified way. Haply he a modern, had been handicapped from his lack of equipment, lack of such discarded kit as I had dreamed about. Quite conceivably he had wrestled last night, not only against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers unknown.

AS TREES WALKING

It was in the spring of last year that I started for a holiday journey towards some ruins about a hundred miles away. I had suffered much in the cold weather from fever and broken rest, so I longed to renew my strength before the heats of summer should be fully come.

I started on a bright and calm September morning by the main southward track, hoping to reach a friend's Mission Station on the eve of the third day.

I reached it then, but I had provoked my enemies by walking in the chilly hours, and walking to weariness. I was feverish and spent ere I reached Greenwood's Mission House.

It stood under a towering granite kopje some ten miles only from the ruins. I had never entered it before. When I last visited Greenwood, quite two years ago, he had been working on a town station. He was a dark, lean, rather ascetic-looking person, not very talkative. I remembered the days when I had fought shy of him; we had seemed to disagree on so many subjects, and he had seemed to resent disagreement so intensely. But he had written me two or three most friendly letters of late, and that nigh?, when I came to his door so sick and sorry, he seemed to be kindness itself. I soon revived by his fireside, ate my supper, and smoked and talked with him to my great content. We were speaking about roughing it, and told many camp-fire and roadside tales. As I told and listened, I seemed to be my old self of a year ago once more, tough and dogged, and rather sinfully contemptuous of mosquitoes and malaria. Yet I had but a poor night after all, and the yawning and shuddering chills came on with vigor at Church in the early morning. I went back to my blankets after an aguish breakfast, and Greenwood dosed me and told me to go to sleep. He spoke with authority, and I obeyed. I did not wake up till the early afternoon. I seemed to have lost much weight in those last steaming hours, and also, to my joy, the fever.

'I hope I'll sleep well to-night and get an early start to-morrow after all,' I said to Greenwood. He looked at me rather intently with his resolute grey eyes.

'The fever is gone for the time,' he said, 'but I don't like the look of your eyes at all. If I were you, I'd change your room to-night and sleep in the Hospital.'

'Where's that?' I asked.

'Oh, not very far; half a mile at most. It's Saint Lucy's little hospice on the hill there across the valley.'

Afterwards, when I went out and sat on the sunny stoep with him, he showed me the place. I could see a grove of trees standing up on a near ridge and two or three thatched buildings in among them; yes, and a white cross surmounting one of these.

'It looks lonely over there,' I pleaded.

'Oh, I'll come with you,' he said. 'I want to tell you the story of the place before we blow our candle out; it may help the cure.' So when sundown was near, he and three of his native retainers started with me for the Hospice of Saint Lucy, carrying goodly packs every one. I was rather dubious about that expedition.

'I hope it's warm there,' grumbled I to myself. 'If Greenwood's as strong as a horse, I am not so just now. I wish he'd camp at home in peace.'

However, I tried to look interested as they made ready for us to go and delighted, as we started away.

Just as we went across the narrow valley the sun went down behind St. Lucy's hill, and bells or gongs answered one another from either side.

'So you have a bell up there at the Hospital,' I said.

'There's more than you expect to see at the Hospital,' said Greenwood mysteriously.

So there was. It wasn't a Hospital at all in our wonted modern sense, but a rather ornate round Church. Outside, it was plain enough, but within it gave me a sense of studied charm and even costliness. No drug-covered or dispenser's table was admitted within its doors, though both were to be found in one of its neighbor buildings. The main building housed aids to recovery, but they were of another type. Over the Altar was a life-sized picture of Saint Lucy, golden-haired and blue grey-eyed, with great splendor of shapeliness and stature, and real English apple-blossom cheeks. She came along a rocky path through an African forest; she was smiling, and had a far-shining lantern in her hand. You could single out the trees in the forest, there was the crimson-flowered tree yet leafless, and the wild fig-tree in full leaf and cluster, and the wild orange-tree; the wild acacias and the cactus trees were growing among the stones above. Far off in the distance, at the back of the picture, there were dim cliffs and pale sands and waves breaking in the bright star-light.

The time was meant to be cock-crow. At least it seemed so, for a red cock was perched on a tree-pole in the foreground of the picture, crowing with a will. In the sky were many stars. The quarter over the sea whence the Saint came was of excelling brightness. There the morning star hung in a haze of glory.

The Altar itself was of granite slabs and masses. Before it burnt a purple-glass lamp, hung by chains of native smithy-work, rather incongruously heavy, I thought. But who was I to cavil at this jewel of a shrine in our wilderness?

'Where are we to sleep?' I asked.

'Here, before the Altar,' said Greenwood solemnly.

Even as he spoke his house-boy came in with hushed feet, and began to spread out our rush mats and many-colored blankets. Then we went into the dispensary hut, and had our supper and many pipes together, while the native boys chatted and chewed roasted monkey-nuts in the hut beside us. I felt very hungry and happy and healthy generally that night, and we sat at our table long, and then smoked far into the hours of darkness. But, though he told me many tales, Greenwood would not tell me the tale of the place, however much I begged him to do so. That was kept for the Shrine itself. That was not as other tales.

We kept up a good fire, for the night was a cold one.