Project Gutenberg's Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, by Olive Schreiner This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland Author: Olive Schreiner Release Date: September 15, 2008 [EBook #1431] Last Updated: October 12, 2016 Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TROOPER PETER HALKET *** Produced by Sue Asscher, and David Widger TROOPER PETER HALKET OF MASHONALAND by Olive Schreiner Author of “Dreams,” “Dream Life and Real Life," “The Story of an African Farm,” etc. Colonial Edition (A photographic plate at the front of the book shows three people hanging from a tree by their necks. Around them stand eight men, looking not at all troubled by their participation in the scene. Of this event all the survivors appear to be white, the victims black. The plate is titled “From a Photograph taken in Matabeleland.” S.A.) To a Great Good Man, Sir George Grey, Once Governor of the Cape Colony, who, during his rule in South Africa, bound to himself the Dutchmen, Englishmen, and Natives he governed, by an uncorruptible justice and a broad humanity; and who is remembered among us today as representing the noblest attributes of an Imperial Rule. “Our low life was the level’s and the night’s; He’s for the morning.” Olive Schreiner. 19, Russell Road, Kensington, W., February, 1897. Aardvark - The great anteater. Cape Smoke - A very inferior brandy made in Cape Colony. Kopje - Little hillock. Kraal - A Kaffir encampment. Mealies - Maize (corn). Riem - A thong of undressed leather universally used in South Africa. Vatje of Old Dop - A little cask of Cape brandy. Veld - Open Country. Contents Chapter I. Chapter II. Chapter I. It was a dark night; a chill breath was coming from the east; not enough to disturb the blaze of Trooper Peter Halket’s fire, yet enough to make it quiver. He sat alone beside it on the top of a kopje. All about was an impenetrable darkness; not a star was visible in the black curve over his head. He had been travelling with a dozen men who were taking provisions of mealies and rice to the next camp. He had been sent out to act as scout along a low range of hills, and had lost his way. Since eight in the morning he had wandered among long grasses, and ironstone kopjes, and stunted bush, and had come upon no sign of human habitation, but the remains of a burnt kraal, and a down- trampled and now uncultivated mealie field, where a month before the Chartered Company’s forces had destroyed a native settlement. Three times in the day it had appeared to him that he had returned to the very spot from which he had started; nor was it his wish to travel very far, for he knew his comrades would come back to look for him, to the neighbourhood where he had last been seen, when it was found at the evening camping ground that he did not appear. Trooper Peter Halket was very weary. He had eaten nothing all day; and had touched little of the contents of a small flask of Cape brandy he carried in his breast pocket, not knowing when it would again be replenished. As night drew near he determined to make his resting place on the top of one of the kopjes, which stood somewhat alone and apart from the others. He could not easily be approached there, without his knowing it. He had not much fear of the natives; their kraals had been destroyed and their granaries burnt for thirty miles round, and they themselves had fled: but he feared, somewhat, the lions, which he had never seen, but of which he had heard, and which might be cowering in the long grasses and brushwood at the kopje’s foot:— and he feared, vaguely, he hardly knew what, when he looked forward to his first long night alone in the veld. By the time the sun had set he had gathered a little pile of stumps and branches on the top of the kopje. He intended to keep a fire burning all night; and as the darkness began to settle down he lit it. It might be his friends would see it from far, and come for him early in the morning; and wild beasts would hardly approach him while he knelt beside it; and of the natives he felt there was little fear. He built up the fire; and determined if it were possible to keep awake the whole night beside it. He was a slight man of middle height, with a sloping forehead and pale blue eyes: but the jaws were hard set, and the thin lips of the large mouth were those of a man who could strongly desire the material good of life, and enjoy it when it came his way. Over the lower half of the face were scattered a few soft white hairs, the growth of early manhood. From time to time he listened intently for possible sounds from the distance where his friends might be encamped, and might fire off their guns at seeing his light; or he listened yet more intently for sounds nearer at hand: but all was still, except for the occasional cracking of the wood in his own fire, and the slight whistle of the breeze as it crept past the stones on the kopje. He doubled up his great hat and put it in the pocket of his overcoat, and put on a little two-pointed cap his mother had made for him, which fitted so close that only one lock of white hair hung out over his forehead. He turned up the collar of his coat to shield his neck and ears, and threw it open in front that the blaze of the fire might warm him. He had known many nights colder than this when he had sat around the camp fire with his comrades, talking of the niggers they had shot or the kraals they had destroyed, or grumbling over their rations; but tonight the chill seemed to creep into his very bones. The darkness of the night above him, and the silence of the veld about him, oppressed him. At times he even wished he might hear the cry of a jackal or of some larger beast of prey in the distance; and he wished that the wind would blow a little louder, instead of making that little wheezing sound as it passed the corners of the stones. He looked down at his gun, which lay cocked ready on the ground at his right side; and from time to time he raised his hand automatically and fingered the cartridges in his belt. Then he stretched out his small wiry hands to the fire and warmed them. It was only half past ten, and it seemed to him he had been sitting here ten hours at the least. After a while he threw two more large logs on the fire, and took the flask out of his pocket. He examined it carefully by the firelight to see how much it held: then he took a small draught, and examined it again to see how much it had fallen; and put it back in his breast pocket. Then Trooper Peter Halket fell to thinking. It was not often that he thought. On patrol and sitting round camp fires with the other men about him there was no time for it; and Peter Halket had never been given to much thinking. He had been a careless boy at the village school; and though, when he left, his mother paid the village apothecary to read learned books with him at night on history and science, he had not retained much of them. As a rule he lived in the world immediately about him, and let the things of the moment impinge on him, and fall off again as they would, without much reflection. But tonight on the kopje he fell to thinking, and his thoughts shaped themselves into connected chains. He wondered first whether his mother would ever get the letter he had posted the week before, and whether it would be brought to her cottage or she would go to the post office to fetch it. And then, he fell to thinking of the little English village where he had been born, and where he had grown up. He saw his mother’s fat white ducklings creep in and out under the gate, and waddle down to the little pond at the back of the yard; he saw the school house that he had hated so much as a boy, and from which he had so often run away to go a-fishing, or a-bird’s-nesting. He saw the prints on the school house wall on which the afternoon sun used to shine when he was kept in; Jesus of Judea blessing the children, and one picture just over the door where he hung with his arms stretched out and the blood dropping from his feet. Then Peter Halket thought of the tower at the ruins which he had climbed so often for birds’ eggs; and he saw his mother standing at her cottage gate when he came home in the evening, and he felt her arms round his neck as she kissed him; but he felt her tears on his cheek, because he had run away from school all day; and he seemed to be making apologies to her, and promising he never would do it again if only she would not cry. He had often thought of her since he left her, on board ship, and when he was working with the prospectors, and since he had joined the troop; but it had been in a vague way; he had not distinctly seen and felt her. But tonight he wished for her as he used to when he was a small boy and lay in his bed in the next room, and saw her shadow through the door as she bent over her wash-tub earning the money which was to feed and clothe him. He remembered how he called her and she came and tucked him in and called him “Little Simon,” which was his second name and had been his father’s, and which she only called him when he was in bed at night, or when he was hurt. He sat there staring into the blaze. He resolved he would make a great deal of money, and she should live with him. He would build a large house in the West End of London, the biggest that had ever been seen, and another in the country, and they should never work any more. Peter Halket sat as one turned into stone, staring into the fire. All men made money when they came to South Africa,—Barney Barnato, Rhodes—they all made money out of the country, eight millions, twelve millions, twenty-six millions, forty millions; why should not he! Peter Halket started suddenly and listened. But it was only the wind coming up the kopje like a great wheezy beast creeping upwards; and he looked back into the fire. He considered his business prospects. When he had served his time as volunteer he would have a large piece of land given him, and the Mashonas and Matabeles would have all their land taken away from them in time, and the Chartered Company would pass a law that they had to work for the white men; and he, Peter Halket, would make them work for him. He would make money. Then he reflected on what he should do with the land if it were no good and he could not make anything out of it. Then, he should have to start a syndicate; called the Peter Halket Gold, or the Peter Halket Iron-mining, or some such name, Syndicate. Peter Halket was not very clear as to how it ought to be started; but he felt certain that he and some other men would have to take shares. They would not have to pay for them. And then they would get some big man in London to take shares. He need not pay for them; they would give them to him; and then the company would be floated. No one would have to pay anything; it was just the name—“The Peter Halket Gold Mining Company, Limited.” It would float in London; and people there who didn’t know the country would buy the shares; THEY would have to give ready money for them, of course; perhaps fifteen pounds a share when they were up!—Peter Halket’s eyes blinked as he looked into the fire.—And then, when the market was up, he, Peter Halket, would sell out all his shares. If he gave himself only six thousand and sold them each for ten pounds, then he, Peter Halket, would have sixty thousand pounds! And then he would start another company, and another. Peter Halket struck his knee softly with his hand. That was the great thing—“Always sell out at the right time.” That point Peter Halket was very clear on. He had heard it so often discussed. Give some shares to men with big names, and sell out: they can sell out too at the right time. Peter Halket stroked his knee thoughtfully. And then the other people, that bought the shares for cash! Well, they could sell out too; they could all sell out! Then Peter Halket’s mind got a little hazy. The matter was getting too difficult for him, like a rule of three sum at school when he could not see the relation between the two first terms and the third. Well, if they didn’t like to sell out at the right time, it was their own faults. Why didn’t they? He, Peter Halket, did not feel responsible for them. Everyone knew that you had to sell out at the right time. If they didn’t choose to sell out at the right time, well, they didn’t. “It’s the shares that you sell, not the shares you keep, that make the money.” But if they couldn’t sell them? Here Peter Halket hesitated.—Well, the British Government would have to buy them, if they were so bad no one else would; and then no one would lose. “The British Government can’t let British share-holders suffer.” He’d heard that often enough. The British taxpayer would have to pay for the Chartered Company, for the soldiers, and all the other things, if IT couldn’t, and take over the shares if it went smash, because there were lords and dukes and princes connected with it. And why shouldn’t they pay for his company? He would have a lord in it too! Peter Halket looked into the fire completely absorbed in his calculations.—Peter Halket, Esq., Director of the Peter Halket Gold Mining Company, Limited. Then, when he had got thousands, Peter Halket, Esq., M.P. Then, when he had millions, Sir Peter Halket, Privy Councillor! He reflected deeply, looking into the blaze. If you had five or six millions you could go where you liked and do what you liked. You could go to Sandringham. You could marry anyone. No one would ask what your mother had been; it wouldn’t matter. A curious dull sinking sensation came over Peter Halket; and he drew in his broad leathern belt two holes tighter. Even if you had only two millions you could have a cook and a valet, to go with you when you went into the veld or to the wars; and you could have as much champagne and other things as you liked. At that moment that seemed to Peter more important than going to Sandringham. He took out his flask of Cape Smoke, and drew a tiny draught from it. Other men had come to South Africa with nothing, and had made everything! Why should not he? He stuck small branches under the two great logs, and a glorious flame burst out. Then he listened again intently. The wind was falling and the night was becoming very still. It was a quarter to twelve now. His back ached, and he would have liked to lie down; but he dared not, for fear he should drop asleep. He leaned forward with his hands between his crossed knees, and watched the blaze he had made. Then, after a while, Peter Halket’s thoughts became less clear: they became at last, rather, a chain of disconnected pictures, painting themselves in irrelevant order on his brain, than a line of connected ideas. Now, as he looked into the crackling blaze, it seemed to be one of the fires they had make to burn the natives’ grain by, and they were throwing in all they could not carry away: then, he seemed to see his mother’s fat ducks waddling down the little path with the green grass on each side. Then, he seemed to see his huts where he lived with the prospectors, and the native women who used to live with him; and he wondered where the women were. Then—he saw the skull of an old Mashona blown off at the top, the hands still moving. He heard the loud cry of the native women and children as they turned the maxims on to the kraal; and then he heard the dynamite explode that blew up a cave. Then again he was working a maxim gun, but it seemed to him it was more like the reaping machine he used to work in England, and that what was going down before it was not yellow corn, but black men’s heads; and he thought when he looked back they lay behind him in rows, like the corn in sheaves. The logs sent up a flame clear and high, and, where they split, showed a burning core inside: the cracking and spluttering sounded in his brain like the discharge of a battery of artillery. Then he thought suddenly of a black woman he and another man caught alone in the bush, her baby on her back, but young and pretty. Well, they didn’t shoot her!—and a black woman wasn’t white! His mother didn’t understand these things; it was all so different in England from South Africa. You couldn’t be expected to do the same sort of things here as there. He had an unpleasant feeling that he was justifying himself to his mother, and that he didn’t know how to. He leaned further and further forward: so far at last, that the little white lock of his hair which hung out under his cap was almost singed by the fire. His eyes were still open, but the lids drooped over them, and his hands hung lower and lower between his knees. There was no picture left on his brain now, but simply an impress of the blazing logs before him. Then, Trooper Peter Halket started. He sat up and listened. The wind had gone; there was not a sound: but he listened intently. The fire burnt up into the still air, two clear red tongues of flame. Then, on the other side of the kopje he heard the sound of footsteps ascending; the slow even tread of bare feet coming up. The hair on Trooper Peter Halket’s forehead slowly stiffened itself. He had no thought of escaping; he was paralyzed with dread. He took up his gun. A deadly coldness crept from his feet to his head. He had worked a maxim gun in a fight when some hundred natives fell and only one white man had been wounded; and he had never known fear; but tonight his fingers were stiff on the lock of his gun. He knelt low, tending a little to one side of the fire, with his gun ready. A stone half sheltered him from anyone coming up from the other side of the kopje, and the instant the figure appeared over the edge he intended to fire. Then, the thought flashed on him; what, and if it were one of his own comrades come in search of him, and no bare-footed enemy! The anguish of suspense wrung his heart; for an instant he hesitated. Then, in a cold agony of terror, he cried out, “Who is there?” And a voice replied in clear, slow English, “A friend.” Peter Halket almost let his gun drop, in the revulsion of feeling. The cold sweat which anguish had restrained burst out in large drops on his forehead; but he still knelt holding his gun. “What do you want?” he cried out quiveringly. From the darkness at the edge of the kopje a figure stepped out into the full blaze of the firelight. Trooper Peter Halket looked up at it. It was the tall figure of a man, clad in one loose linen garment, reaching lower than his knees, and which clung close about him. His head, arms, and feet were bare. He carried no weapon of any kind; and on his shoulders hung heavy locks of dark hair. Peter Halket looked up at him with astonishment. “Are you alone?” he asked. “Yes, I am alone.” Peter Halket lowered his gun and knelt up. “Lost your way, I suppose?” he said, still holding his weapon loosely. “No; I have come to ask whether I may sit beside your fire for a while.” “Certainly, certainly!” said Peter, eyeing the stranger’s dress carefully, still holding his gun, but with the hand off the lock. “I’m confoundedly glad of any company. It’s a beastly night for anyone to be out alone. Wonder you find your way. Sit down! sit down!” Peter looked intently at the stranger; then he put his gun down at his side. The stranger sat down on the opposite side of the fire. His complexion was dark; his arms and feet were bronzed; but his aquiline features, and the domed forehead, were not of any South African race. “One of the Soudanese Rhodes brought with him from the north, I suppose?” said Peter, still eyeing him curiously. “No; Cecil Rhodes has had nothing to do with my coming here,” said the stranger. “Oh—” said Peter. “You didn’t perhaps happen to come across a company of men today, twelve white men and seven coloured, with three cart loads of provisions? We were taking them to the big camp, and I got parted from my troop this morning. I’ve not been able to find them, though I’ve been seeking for them ever since.” The stranger warmed his hands slowly at the fire; then he raised his head:—“They are camped at the foot of those hills tonight,” he said, pointing with his hand into the darkness at the left. “Tomorrow early they will be here, before the sun has risen.” “Oh, you’ve met them, have you!” said Peter joyfully; “that’s why you weren’t surprised at finding me here. Take a drop!” He took the small flask from his pocket and held it out. “I’m sorry there’s so little, but a drop will keep the cold out.” The stranger bowed his head; but thanked and declined. Peter raised the flask to his lips and took a small draught; then returned it to his pocket. The stranger folded his arms about his knees, and looked into the fire. “Are you a Jew?” asked Peter, suddenly; as the firelight fell full on the stranger’s face. “Yes; I am a Jew.” “Ah,” said Peter, “that’s why I wasn’t able to make out at first what nation you could be of; your dress, you know—” Then he stopped, and said, “Trading here, I suppose? Which country do you come from; are you a Spanish Jew?” “I am a Jew of Palestine.” “Ah!” said Peter; “I haven’t seen many from that part yet. I came out with a lot on board ship; and I’ve seen Barnato and Beit; but they’re not very much like you. I suppose it’s coming from Palestine makes the difference.” All fear of the stranger had now left Peter Halket. “Come a little nearer the fire,” he said, “you must be cold, you haven’t too much wraps. I’m chill in this big coat.” Peter Halket pushed his gun a little further away from him; and threw another large log on the fire. “I’m sorry I haven’t anything to eat to offer you; but I haven’t had anything myself since last night. It’s beastly sickening, being out like this with nothing to eat. Wouldn’t have thought a fellow’d feel so bad after only a day of it. Have you ever been out without grub?” said Peter cheerfully, warming his hands at the blaze. “Forty days and nights,” said the stranger. “Forty days! Ph—e—ew!” said Peter. “You must have have had a lot to drink, or you wouldn’t have stood it. I was feeling blue enough when you turned up, but I’m better now, warmer.” Peter Halket re-arranged the logs on the fire. “In the employ of the Chartered Company, I suppose?” said Peter, looking into the fire he had made. “No,” said the stranger; “I have nothing to do with the Chartered Company.” “Oh,” said Peter, “I don’t wonder, then, that things aren’t looking very smart with you! There’s not too much cakes and ale up here for those that do belong to it, if they’re not big-wigs, and none at all for those who don’t. I tried it when I first came up here. I was with a prospector who was hooked on to the Company somehow, but I worked on my own account for the prospector by the day. I tell you what, it’s not the men who work up here who make the money; it’s the big-wigs who get the concessions!” Peter felt exhilarated by the presence of the stranger. That one unarmed man had robbed him of all fear. Seeing that the stranger did not take up the thread of conversation, he went on after a time: “It wasn’t such a bad life, though. I only wish I was back there again. I had two huts to myself, and a couple of nigger girls. It’s better fun,” said Peter, after a while, “having these black women than whites. The whites you’ve got to support, but the niggers support you! And when you’ve done with them you can just get rid of them. I’m all for the nigger gals.” Peter laughed. But the stranger sat motionless with his arms about his knees. “You got any girls?” said Peter. “Care for niggers?” “I love all women,” said the stranger, refolding his arms about his knees. “Oh, you do, do you?” said Peter. “Well, I’m pretty sick of them. I had bother enough with mine,” he said genially, warming his hands by the fire, and then interlocking the fingers and turning the palms towards the blaze as one who prepares to enjoy a good talk. “One girl was only fifteen; I got her cheap from a policeman who was living with her, and she wasn’t much. But the other, by Gad! I never saw another nigger like her; well set up, I tell you, and as straight as that—” said Peter, holding up his finger in the firelight. “She was thirty if she was a day. Fellows don’t generally fancy women that age; they like slips of girls. But I set my heart on her the day I saw her. She belonged to the chap I was with. He got her up north. There was a devil of a row about his getting her, too; she’d got a nigger husband and two children; didn’t want to leave them, or some nonsense of that sort: you know what these niggers are? Well, I tried to get the other fellow to let me have her, but the devil a bit he would. I’d only got the other girl, and I didn’t much fancy her; she was only a child. Well, I went down Umtali way and got a lot of liquor and stuff, and when I got back to camp I found them clean dried out. They hadn’t had a drop of liquor in camp for ten days, and the rainy season coming on and no knowing when they’d get any. Well, I’d a vatje of Old Dop as high as that—,” indicating with his hand an object about two feet high, “and the other fellow wanted to buy it from me. I knew two of that. I said I wanted it for myself. He offered me this, and he offered me that. At last I said, ‘Well, just to oblige you, I give you the vatje and you give me the girl!’ And so he did. Most people wouldn’t have fancied a nigger girl who’d had two nigger children, but I didn’t mind; it’s all the same to me. And I tell you she worked. She made a garden, and she and the other girl worked in it; I tell you I didn’t need to buy a sixpence of food for them in six months, and I used to sell green mealies and pumpkins to all the fellows about. There weren’t many flies on her, I tell you. She picked up English quicker than I picked up her lingo, and took to wearing a dress and shawl.” The stranger still sat motionless, looking into the fire. Peter Halket reseated himself more comfortably before the fire. “Well, I came home to the huts one day, rather suddenly, you know, to fetch something; and what did I find? She, talking at the hut door with a nigger man. Now it was my strict orders they were neither to speak a word to a nigger man at all; so I asked what it was. And she answers, as cool as can be, that he was a stranger going past on the road, and asked her to give him a drink of water. Well, I just ordered him off. I didn’t think anything more about it. But I remember now. I saw him hanging about the camp the day after. Well, she came to me the next day and asked me for a lot of cartridges. She’d never asked me for anything before. I asked her what the devil a woman wanted with cartridges, and she said the old nigger woman who helped carry in water to the garden said she couldn’t stay and help her any more unless she got some cartridges to give her son who was going up north hunting elephants. The woman got over me to give her the cartridges because she was going to have a kid, and she said she couldn’t do the watering without help. So I gave them her. I never put two and two together. “Well, when I heard that the Company was going to have a row with the Matabele, I thought I’d volunteer. They said there was lots of loot to be got, and land to be given out, and that sort of thing, and I thought I’d only be gone about three months. So I went. I left those women there, and a lot of stuff in the garden and some sugar and rice, and I told them not to leave till I came back; and I asked the other man to keep an eye on them. Both those women were Mashonas. They always said the Mashonas didn’t love the Matabele; but, by God, it turned out that they loved them better than they loved us. They’ve got the damned impertinence to say, that the Matabele oppressed them sometimes, but the white man oppresses them all the time! “Well, I left those women there,” said Peter, dropping his hands on his knees. “Mind you, I’d treated those women really well. I’d never given either of them one touch all the time I had them. I was the talk of all the fellows round, the way I treated them. Well, I hadn’t been gone a month, when I got a letter from the man I worked with, the one who had the woman first—he’s dead now, poor fellow; they found him at his hut door with his throat cut—and what do you think he said to me? Why, I hadn’t been gone six hours when those two women skooted! It was all the big one. What do you think she did? She took every ounce of ball and cartridge she could find in that hut, and my old Martini-Henry, and even the lid off the tea-box to melt into bullets for the old muzzle-loaders they have; and off she went, and took the young one too. The fellow wrote me they didn’t touch another thing: they left the shawls and dresses I gave them kicking about the huts, and went off naked with only their blankets and the ammunition on their heads. A nigger man met them twenty miles off, and he said they were skooting up for Lo Magundi’s country as fast as they could go. “And do you know,” said Peter, striking his knee, and looking impressively across the fire at the stranger; “what I’m as sure of as that I’m sitting here? It’s that that nigger I caught at my hut, that day, was her nigger husband! He’d come to fetch her that time; and when she saw she couldn’t get away without our catching her, she got the cartridges for him!” Peter paused impressively between the words. “And now she’s gone back to him. It’s for him she’s taken that ammunition!” Peter looked across the fire at the stranger, to see what impression his story was making. “I tell you what,” said Peter, “if I’d had any idea that day who that bloody nigger was, the day I saw him standing at my door, I’d have given him one cartridge in the back of his head more than ever he reckoned for!” Peter looked triumphantly at the stranger. This was his only story; and he had told it a score of times round the camp fire for the benefit of some new-comer. When this point was reached, a low murmur of applause and sympathy always ran round the group: tonight there was quiet; the stranger’s large dark eyes watched the fire almost as though he heard nothing. “I shouldn’t have minded so much,” said Peter after a while, “though no man likes to have his woman taken away from him; but she was going to have a kid in a month or two—and so was the little one for anything I know; she looked like it! I expect they did away with it before it came; they’ve no hearts, these niggers; they’d think nothing of doing that with a white man’s child. They’ve no hearts; they’d rather go back to a black man, however well you’ve treated them. It’s all right if you get them quite young and keep them away from their own people; but if once a nigger woman’s had a nigger man and had children by him, you might as well try to hold a she- devil! they’ll always go back. If ever I’m shot, it’s as likely as not it’ll be by my own gun, with my own cartridges. And she’d stand by and watch it, and cheer them on; though I never gave her a blow all the time she was with me. But I tell you what—if ever I come across that bloody nigger, I’ll take it out of him. He won’t count many days to his year, after I’ve spotted him!” Peter Halket paused. It seemed to him that the eyes under their heavy, curled lashes, were looking at something beyond him with an infinite sadness, almost as of eyes that wept. “You look awfully tired,” said Peter; “wouldn’t you like to lie down and sleep? You could put your head down on that stone, and I’d keep watch.” “I have no need of sleep,” the stranger said; “I will watch with you.” “You’ve been in the wars, too, I see,” said Peter, bending forward a little, and looking at the stranger’s feet. “By God! Both of them!—And right through! You must have had a bad time of it?” “It was very long ago,” said the stranger. Peter Halket threw two more logs on the fire. “Do you know,” he said, “I’ve been wondering ever since you came, who it was you reminded me of. It’s my mother! You’re not like her in the face, but when your eyes look at me it seems to me as if it was she looking at me. Curious, isn’t it? I don’t know you from Adam, and you’ve hardly spoken a word since you came; and yet I seem as if I’d known you all my life.” Peter moved a little nearer him. “I was awfully afraid of you when you first came; even when I first saw you;— you aren’t dressed as most of us dress, you know. But the minute the fire shone on your face I said, ‘It’s all right.’ Curious, isn’t it?” said Peter. “I don’t know you from Adam, but if you were to take up my gun and point it at me, I wouldn’t move! I’d lie down here and go to sleep with my head at your feet; curious, isn’t it, when I don’t know you from Adam? My name’s Peter Halket. What’s yours?” But the stranger was arranging the logs on the fire. The flames shot up bright and high, and almost hid him from Peter Halket’s view. “By gad! how they burn when you arrange them!” said Peter. They sat quiet in the blaze for a while. Then Peter said, “Did you see any niggers about yesterday? I haven’t come across any in this part.” “There is,” said the stranger, raising himself, “an old woman in a cave over yonder, and there is one man in the bush, ten miles from this spot. He has lived there six weeks, since you destroyed the kraal, living on roots or herbs. He was wounded in the thigh, and left for dead. He is waiting till you have all left this part of the country that he may set out to follow his own people. His leg is not yet so strong that he may walk fast.” “Did you speak to him?” said Peter. “I took him down to the water where a large pool was. The bank was too high for the man to descend alone.” “It’s a lucky thing for you our fellows didn’t catch you,” said Peter. “Our captain’s a regular little martinet. He’d shoot you as soon as look at you, if he saw you fooling round with a wounded nigger. It’s lucky you kept out of his way.” “The young ravens have meat given to them,” said the stranger, lifting himself up; “and the lions go down to the streams to drink.” “Ah—yes—” said Peter; “but that’s because we can’t help it!” They were silent again for a little while. Then Peter, seeing that the stranger showed no inclination to speak, said, “Did you hear of the spree they had up Bulawayo way, hanging those three niggers for spies? I wasn’t there myself, but a fellow who was told me they made the niggers jump down from the tree and hang themselves; one fellow wouldn’t bally jump, till they gave him a charge of buckshot in the back: and then he caught hold of a branch with his hands and they had to shoot ‘em loose. He didn’t like hanging. I don’t know if it’s true, of course; I wasn’t there myself, but a fellow who was told me. Another fellow who was at Bulawayo, but who wasn’t there when they were hung, said they fired at them just after they jumped, to kill ‘em. I—” “I was there,” said the stranger. “Oh, you were?” said Peter. “I saw a photograph of the niggers hanging, and our fellows standing round smoking; but I didn’t see you in it. I suppose you’d just gone away?” “I was beside the men when they were hung,” said the stranger. “Oh, you were, were you?” said Peter. “I don’t much care about seeing that sort of thing myself. Some fellows think it’s the best fun out to see the niggers kick; but I can’t stand it: it turns my stomach. It’s not liver-heartedness,” said Peter, quickly, anxious to remove any adverse impression as to his courage which the stranger might form; “if it’s shooting or fighting, I’m there. I’ve potted as many niggers as any man in our troop, I bet. It’s floggings and hangings I’m off. It’s the way one’s brought up, you know. My mother never even would kill our ducks; she let them die of old age, and we had the feathers and the eggs: and she was always drumming into me;— don’t hit a fellow smaller than yourself; don’t hit a fellow weaker than yourself; don’t hit a fellow unless he can hit you back as good again. When you’ve always had that sort of thing drummed into you, you can’t get rid of it, somehow. Now there was that other nigger they shot. They say he sat as still as if he was cut out of stone, with his arms round his legs; and some of the fellows gave him blows about the head and face before they took him off to shoot him. Now, that’s the sort of thing I can’t do. It makes me sick here, somehow.” Peter put his hand rather low down over the pit of his stomach. “I’ll shoot as many as you like if they’ll run, but they mustn’t be tied up.” “I was there when that man was shot,” said the stranger. “Why, you seem to have been everywhere,” said Peter. “Have you seen Cecil Rhodes?” “Yes, I have seen him,” said the stranger. “Now he’s death on niggers,” said Peter Halket, warming his hands by the fire; “they say when he was Prime Minister down in the Colony he tried to pass a law that would give their masters and mistresses the right to have their servants flogged whenever they did anything they didn’t like; but the other Englishmen wouldn’t let him pass it. But here he can do what he likes. That’s the reason some fellows don’t want him to be sent away. They say, ‘If we get the British Government here, they’ll be giving the niggers land to live on; and let them have the vote, and get civilised and educated, and all that sort of thing; but Cecil Rhodes, he’ll keep their noses to the grindstone.’ ‘I prefer land to niggers,’ he says. They say he’s going to parcel them out, and make them work on our lands whether they like it or not—just as good as having slaves, you know: and you haven’t the bother of looking after them when they’re old. Now, there I’m with Rhodes; I think it’s an awfully good move. We don’t come out here to work; it’s all very well in England; but we’ve come here to make money, and how are we to make it, unless you get niggers to work for you, or start a syndicate? He’s death on niggers, is Rhodes!” said Peter, meditating; “they say if we had the British Government here and you were thrashing a nigger and something happened, there’d be an investigation, and all that sort of thing. But, with Cecil, it’s all right, you can do what you like with the niggers, provided you don’t get HIM into trouble.” The stranger watched the clear flame as it burnt up high in the still night air; then suddenly he started. “What is it?” said Peter; “do you hear anything?” “I hear far off,” said the stranger, “the sound of weeping, and the sound of blows. And I hear the voices of men and women calling to me.” Peter listened intently. “I don’t hear anything!” he said. “It must be in your head. I sometimes get a noise in mine.” He listened intently. “No, there’s nothing. It’s all so deadly still.” They sat silent for a while. “Peter Simon Halket,” said the stranger suddenly—Peter started; he had not told him his second name—“if it should come to pass that you should obtain those lands you have desired, and you should obtain black men to labour on them and make to yourself great wealth; or should you create that company”—Peter started—“and fools should buy from you, so that you became the richest man in the land; and if you should take to yourself wide lands, and raise to yourself great palaces, so that princes and great men of earth crept up to you and laid their hands against yours, so that you might slip gold into them—what would it profit you?” “Profit!” Peter Halket stared: “Why, it would profit everything. What makes Beit and Rhodes and Barnato so great? If you’ve got eight millions—” “Peter Simon Halket, which of those souls you have seen on earth is to you greatest?” said the stranger, “Which soul is to you fairest?” “Ah,” said Peter, “but we weren’t talking of souls at all; we were talking of money. Of course if it comes to souls, my mother’s the best person I’ve ever seen. But what does it help her? She’s got to stand washing clothes for those stuck-up nincompoops of fine ladies! Wait till I’ve got money! It’ll be somebody else then, who—” “Peter Halket,” said the stranger, “who is the greatest; he who serves or he who is served?” Peter looked at the stranger: then it flashed on him that he was mad. “Oh,” he said, “if it comes to that, what’s anything! You might as well say, sitting there in your old linen shirt, that you were as great as Rhodes or Beit or Barnato, or a king. Of course a man’s just the same whatever he’s got on or whatever he has; but he isn’t the same to other people.” “There have kings been born in stables,” said the stranger. Then Peter saw that he was joking, and laughed. “It must have been a long time ago; they don’t get born there now,” he said. “Why, if God Almighty came to this country, and hadn’t half-a-million in shares, they wouldn’t think much of Him.” Peter built up his fire. Suddenly he felt the stranger’s eyes were fixed on him. “Who gave you your land?” the stranger asked. “Mine! Why, the Chartered Company,” said Peter. The stranger looked back into the fire. “And who gave it to them?” he asked softly. “Why, England, of course. She gave them the land to far beyond the Zambezi to do what they liked with, and make as much money out of as they could, and she’d back ‘em.” “Who gave the land to the men and women of England?” asked the stranger softly. “Why, the devil! They said it was theirs, and of course it was,” said Peter. “And the people of the land: did England give you the people also?” Peter looked a little doubtfully at the stranger. “Yes, of course, she gave us the people; what use would the land have been to us otherwise?” “And who gave her the people, the living flesh and blood, that she might give them away, into the hands of others?” asked the stranger, raising himself. Peter looked at him and was half afeared. “Well, what could she do with a lot of miserable niggers, if she didn’t give them to us? A lot of good-for-nothing rebels they are, too,” said Peter. “What is a rebel?” asked the stranger. “My Gawd!” said Peter, “you must have lived out of the world if you don’t know what a rebel is! A rebel is a man who fights against his king and his country. These bloody niggers here are rebels because they are fighting against us. They don’t want the Chartered Company to have them. But they’ll have to. We’ll teach them a lesson,” said Peter Halket, the pugilistic spirit rising, firmly reseating himself on the South African earth, which two years before he had never heard of, and eighteen months before he had never seen, as if it had been his mother earth, and the land in which he first saw light. The stranger watched the fire; then he said musingly, “I have seen a land far from here. In that land are men of two kinds who live side by side. Well nigh a thousand years ago one conquered the other; they have lived together since. Today the one people seeks to drive forth the other who conquered them. Are these men rebels, too?” “Well,” said Peter, pleased at being deferred to, “that all depends who they are, you know!” “They call the one nation Turks, and the other Armenians,” said the stranger. “Oh, the Armenians aren’t rebels,” said Peter; “they are on our side! The papers are all full of it,” said Peter, pleased to show his knowledge. “Those bloody Turks! What right had they to conquer the Armenians? Who gave them their land? I’d like to have a shot at them myself!” “WHY are Armenians not rebels?” asked the stranger, gently. “Oh, you do ask such curious questions,” said Peter. “If they don’t like the Turks, why should they have ‘em? If the French came now and conquered us, and we tried to drive them out first chance we had; you wouldn’t call us rebels! Why shouldn’t they try to turn those bloody Turks out? Besides,” said Peter, bending over and talking in the manner of one who imparts secret and important information; “you see, if we don’t help the Armenians the Russians would; and we,” said Peter, looking exceedingly knowing, “we’ve got to prevent that: they’d get the land; and it’s on the road to India. And we don’t mean them to. I suppose you don’t know much about politics in Palestine?” said Peter, looking kindly and patronisingly at the stranger. “If these men,” said the stranger, “would rather be free, or be under the British Government, than under the Chartered Company, why, when they resist the Chartered Company, are they more rebels than the Armenians when they resist the Turk? Is the Chartered Company God, that every knee should bow before it, and before it every head be bent? Would you, the white men of England, submit to its rule for one day?” “Ah,” said Peter, “no, of course we shouldn’t, but we are white men, and so are the Armenians—almost—” Then he glanced at the stranger’s dark face, and added quickly, “At least, it’s not the colour that matters, you know. I rather like a dark face, my mother’s eyes are brown—but the Armenians, you know, they’ve got long hair like us.” “Oh, it is the hair, then, that matters,” said the stranger softly. “Oh, well,” said Peter, “it’s not altogether, of course. But it’s quite a different thing, the Armenians wanting to get rid of the Turks, and these bloody niggers wanting to get rid of the Chartered Company. Besides, the Armenians are Christians, like us!” “Are YOU Christians?” A strange storm broke across the stranger’s features; he rose to his feet. “Why, of course, we are!” said Peter. “We’re all Christians, we English. Perhaps you don’t like Christians, though? Some Jews don’t, I know,” said Peter, looking up soothingly at him. “I neither love nor hate any man for that which he is called,” said the stranger; “the name boots nothing.” The stranger sat down again beside the fire, and folded his hands. “Is the Chartered Company Christian also?” he asked. “Yes, oh yes,” said Peter. “What is a Christian?” asked the stranger. “Well, now, you really do ask such curious questions. A Christian is a man who believes in Heaven and Hell, and God and the Bible, and in Jesus Christ, that he’ll save him from going to Hell, and if he believes he’ll be saved, he will be saved.” “But here, in this world, what is a Christian?” “Why,” said Peter, “I’m a Christian—we’re all Christians.” The stranger looked into the fire; and Peter thought he would change the subject. “It’s curious how like my mother you are; I mean, your ways. She was always saying to me, ‘Don’t be too anxious to make money, Peter. Too much wealth is as bad as too much poverty.’ You’re very like her.” After a while Peter said, bending over a little towards the stranger, “If you don’t want to make money, what did you come to this land for? No one comes here for anything else. Are you in with the Portuguese?” “I am not more with one people than with another,” said the stranger. “The Frenchman is not more to me than the Englishman, the Englishman than the Kaffir, the Kaffir than the Chinaman. I have heard,” said the stranger, “the black infant cry as it crept on its mother’s body and sought for her breast as she lay dead in the roadway. I have heard also the rich man’s child wail in the palace. I hear all cries.” Peter looked intently at him. “Why, who are you?” he said; then, bending nearer to the stranger and looking up, he added, “What is it that you are doing here?” “I belong,” said the stranger, “to the strongest company on earth.” “Oh,” said Peter, sitting up, the look of wonder passing from his face. “So that’s it, is it? Is it diamonds, or gold, or lands?” “We are the most vast of all companies on the earth,” said the stranger; “and we are always growing. We have among us men of every race and from every land; the Esquimo, the Chinaman, the Turk, and the Englishman, we have of them all. We have men of every religion, Buddhists, Mahomedans, Confucians, Freethinkers, Atheists, Christians, Jews. It matters to us nothing by what name the man is named, so he be one of us.” And Peter said, “It must be hard for you all to understand one another, if you are of so many different kinds?” The stranger answered, “There is a sign by which we all know one another, and by which all the world may know us.” (By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.) And Peter said, “What is that sign?” But the stranger was silent. “Oh, a kind of freemasonry!” said Peter, leaning on his elbow towards the stranger, and looking up at him from under his pointed cap. “Are there any more of you here in this country?” “There are,” said the stranger. Then he pointed with his hand into the darkness. “There in a cave were two women. When you blew the cave up they were left unhurt behind a fallen rock. When you took away all the grain, and burnt what you could not carry, there was one basketful that you knew nothing of. The women stayed there, for one was eighty, and one near the time of her giving birth; and they dared not set out to follow the remnant of their tribe because you were in the plains below. Every day the old woman doled grain from the basket; and at night they cooked it in their cave where you could not see their smoke; and every day the old woman gave the young one two handfuls and kept one for herself, saying, ‘Because of the child within you.’ And when the child was born and the young woman strong, the old woman took a cloth and filled it with all the grain that was in the basket; and she put the grain on the young woman’s head and tied the child on her back, and said, ‘Go, keeping always along the bank of the river, till you come north to the land where our people are gone; and some day you can send and fetch me.’ And the young woman said, ‘Have you corn...