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+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
+
+Posting Date: September 15, 2008 [EBook #1431]
+Release Date: August, 1998
+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
+
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+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 in the basket to last till they
+come?’ And she said, ‘I have enough.’ And she sat at the broken door of
+the cave and watched the young woman go down the hill and up the river
+bank till she was hidden by the bush; and she looked down at the plain
+below, and she saw the spot where the kraal had been and where she had
+planted mealies when she was a young girl--”
+
+“I met a woman with corn on her head and a child on her back!” said
+Peter under his breath.
+
+“--And tonight I saw her sit again at the door of the cave; and when the
+sun had set she grew cold; and she crept in and lay down by the basket.
+Tonight, at half-past three, she will die. I have known her since she
+was a little child and played about the huts, while her mother worked in
+the mealie fields. She was one of our company.”
+
+“Oh,” said Peter.
+
+“Other members we have here,” said the stranger. “There was a
+prospector”--he pointed north; “he was a man who drank and swore when it
+listed him; but he had many servants, and they knew where to find him in
+need. When they were ill, he tended them with his own hands; when they
+were in trouble, they came to him for help. When this war began, and all
+black men’s hearts were bitter, because certain white men had lied
+to them, and their envoys had been killed when they would have asked
+England to put her hand out over them; at that time certain of the
+men who fought the white men came to the prospector’s hut. And the
+prospector fired at them from a hole he had cut in his door; but they
+fired back at him with an old elephant gun, and the bullet pierced
+his side and he fell on the floor:--because the innocent man suffers
+oftentimes for the guilty, and the merciful man falls while the
+oppressor flourishes. Then his black servant who was with him took him
+quickly in his arms, and carried him out at the back of the hut, and
+down into the river bed where the water flowed and no man could trace
+his footsteps, and hid him in a hole in the river wall. And when the men
+broke into the hut they could find no white man, and no traces of his
+feet. But at evening, when the black servant returned to the hut to get
+food and medicine for his master, the men who were fighting caught him,
+and they said, ‘Oh, you betrayer of your people, white man’s dog,
+who are on the side of those who take our lands and our wives and our
+daughters before our eyes; tell us where you have hidden him?’ And when
+he would not answer them, they killed him before the door of the hut.
+And when the night came, the white man crept up on his hands and knees,
+and came to his hut to look for food. All the other men were gone, but
+his servant lay dead before the door; and the white man knew how it must
+have happened. He could not creep further, and he lay down before
+the door, and that night the white man and the black lay there dead
+together, side by side. Both those men were of my friends.”
+
+“It was damned plucky of the nigger,” said Peter; “but I’ve heard of
+their doing that sort of thing before. Even of a girl who wouldn’t tell
+where her mistress was, and getting killed. But,” he added doubtfully,
+“all your company seem to be niggers or to get killed?”
+
+“They are of all races,” said the stranger. “In a city in the old Colony
+is one of us, small of stature and small of voice. It came to pass on a
+certain Sunday morning, when the men and women were gathered before him,
+that he mounted his pulpit: and he said when the time for the sermon
+came, ‘In place that I should speak to you, I will read you a history.’
+And he opened an old book more than two thousand years old: and he read:
+‘Now it came to pass that Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard, which
+was in Jezreel, hard by the palace of Ahab king of Samaria.
+
+“‘And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may
+have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house: and I
+will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seemeth good
+to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money.
+
+“‘And Naboth said to Ahab, The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the
+inheritance of my father unto thee.
+
+“‘And Ahab came into his house heavy and displeased because of the word
+which Naboth the Jezreelite had spoken unto him; for he had said, I will
+not give thee the inheritance of my fathers.’
+
+“The man read the whole story until it was ended. Then he closed the
+book, and he said, ‘My friends, Naboth has a vineyard in this land;
+and in it there is much gold; and Ahab has desired to have it that the
+wealth may be his.’
+
+“And he put the old book aside, and he took up another which was written
+yesterday. And the men and women whispered one to another, even in the
+church, ‘Is not that the Blue Book Report of the Select Committee of the
+Cape Parliament on the Jameson raid?’
+
+“And the man said, ‘Friends, the first story I have read you is one of
+the oldest stories of the world: the story I am about to read you is
+one of the newest. Truth is not more truth because it is three thousand
+years old, nor is it less truth because it is of yesterday. All books
+which throw light on truth are God’s books, therefore I shall read to
+you from the pages before me. Shall the story of Ahab king of Samaria
+profit us when we know not the story of the Ahabs of our day; and the
+Naboths of our land be stoned while we sit at east?’ And he read to them
+portions of that book. And certain rich men and women rose up and went
+out even while he spoke, and his wife also went out.
+
+“And when the service was ended and the man returned to his home, his
+wife came to him weeping; and she said, ‘Did you see how some of the
+most wealthy and important people got up and went out this morning? Why
+did you preach such a sermon, when we were just going to have the new
+wing added to our house, and you thought they were going to raise your
+salary? You have not a single Boer in your congregation! Why need you
+say the Chartered Company raid on Johannesburg was wrong?’
+
+“He said, ‘My wife, if I believe that certain men whom we have raised on
+high, and to whom we have given power, have done a cowardly wrong, shall
+I not say it?’
+
+“And she said, ‘Yes, and only a little while ago, when Rhodes was
+licking the dust off the Boers’ feet that he might keep them from
+suspecting while he got ready this affair, then you attacked both Rhodes
+and the Bond (The Afrikander Bond, the organised Dutch political party,
+through whom Mr. Rhodes worked, and by whom he was backed.) for trying
+to pass a Bill for flogging the niggers, and we lost fifty pounds we
+might have got for the church?’ And he said, ‘My wife, cannot God be
+worshipped as well under the dome of the heaven He made as in a golden
+palace? Shall a man keep silence, when he sees oppression, to earn money
+for God? If I have defended the black man when I believed him to be
+wronged, shall I not also defend the white man, my flesh-brother? Shall
+we speak when one man is wronged and not when it is another?’
+
+“And she said, ‘Yes, but you have your family and yourself to think of!
+Why are you always in opposition to the people who could do something
+for us? You are only loved by the poor. If it is necessary for you to
+attack some one, why don’t you attack the Jews for killing Christ, or
+Herod, or Pontius Pilate; why don’t you leave alone the men who are in
+power today, and who with their money can crush you!’
+
+“And he said, ‘Oh my wife, those Jews, and Herod, and Pontius Pilate are
+long dead. If I should preach of them now, would it help them? Would it
+save one living thing from their clutches? The past is dead, it lives
+only for us to learn from. The present, the present only, is ours to
+work in, and the future ours to create. Is all the gold of Johannesburg
+or are all the diamonds in Kimberley worth, that one Christian man
+should fall by the hand of his fellows--aye, or one heathen brother?’
+
+“And she answered, ‘Oh, that is all very well. If you were a really
+eloquent preacher, and could draw hundreds of men about you, and in time
+form a great party with you at its head, I shouldn’t mind what you said.
+But you, with your little figure and your little voice, who will ever
+follow you? You will be left all alone; that is all the good that will
+ever come to you through it.’
+
+“And he said, ‘Oh my wife, have I not waited and watched and hoped that
+they who are nobler and stronger than I, all over this land, would lift
+up their voices and speak--and there is only a deadly silence? Here
+and there one has dared to speak aloud; but the rest whisper behind the
+hand; one says, ‘My son has a post, he would lose it if I spoke loud’;
+and another says, ‘I have a promise of land’; and another, ‘I am
+socially intimate with these men, and should lose my social standing if
+I let my voice be heard.’ Oh my wife, our land, our goodly land, which
+we had hoped would be free and strong among the peoples of earth, is
+rotten and honeycombed with the tyranny of gold! We who had hoped to
+stand first in the Anglo-Saxon sisterhood for justice and freedom, are
+not even fit to stand last. Do I not know only too bitterly how weak is
+my voice; and that that which I can do is as nothing: but shall I remain
+silent? Shall the glow-worm refuse to give its light, because it is not
+a star set up on high; shall the broken stick refuse to burn and warm
+one frozen man’s hands, because it is not a beacon-light flaming across
+the earth? Ever a voice is behind my shoulder, that whispers to me--‘Why
+break your head against a stone wall? Leave this work to the greater and
+larger men of your people; they who will do it better than you can do
+it! Why break your heart when life could be so fair to you?’ But, oh my
+wife, the strong men are silent! and shall I not speak, though I know my
+power is as nothing?’
+
+“He laid his head upon his hands.
+
+“And she said, ‘I cannot understand you. When I come home and tell
+you that this man drinks, or that that woman has got into trouble, you
+always answer me, ‘Wife, what business is it of ours if so be that we
+cannot help them?’ A little innocent gossip offends you; and you go to
+visit people and treat them as your friends, into whose house I would
+not go. Yet when the richest and strongest men in the land, who could
+crush you with their money, as a boy crushes a fly between his finger
+and thumb, take a certain course, you stand and oppose them.’
+
+“And he said, ‘My wife, with the sins of the private man, what have I to
+do, if so be I have not led him into them? Am I guilty? I have enough to
+do looking after my own sins. The sin that a man sins against himself is
+his alone, not mine; the sin that a man sins against his fellows is his
+and theirs, not mine: but the sins that a man sins, in that he is taken
+up by the hands of a people and set up on high, and whose hand they have
+armed with their sword, whose power to strike is their power--his sins
+are theirs; there is no man so small in the whole nation that he dares
+say, ‘I have no responsibility for this man’s action.’ We armed him, we
+raised him, we strengthened him, and the evil he accomplishes is more
+ours than his. If this man’s end in South Africa should be accomplished,
+and the day should come when, from the Zambezi to the sea, white man
+should fly at white man’s throat, and every man’s heart burn with
+bitterness against his fellow, and the land be bathed with blood as
+rain--shall I then dare to pray, who have now feared to speak? Do not
+think I wish for punishment upon these men. Let them take the millions
+they have wrung out of this land, and go to the lands of their birth,
+and live in wealth, luxury, and joy; but let them leave this land they
+have tortured and ruined. Let them keep the money they have made here;
+we may be the poorer for it; but they cannot then crush our freedom with
+it. Shall I ask my God Sunday by Sunday to brood across the land, and
+bind all its children’s hearts in a close-knit fellowship;--yet, when I
+see its people betrayed, and their jawbone broken by a stroke from the
+hand of gold; when I see freedom passing from us, and the whole land
+being grasped by the golden claw, so that the generation after us shall
+be born without freedom, to labour for the men who have grasped all,
+shall I hold my peace? The Boer and the Englishman who have been in this
+land, have not always loved mercy, nor have they always sought after
+justice; but the little finger of the speculator and monopolist who are
+devouring this land will be thicker on the backs of the children of this
+land, black and white, than the loins of the Dutchmen and Englishmen who
+have been.’
+
+“And she said, ‘I have heard it said that it was our duty to sacrifice
+ourselves for the men and women living in the world at the same time as
+ourselves; but I never before heard that we had to sacrifice ourselves
+for people that are not born. What are they to you? You will be dust,
+and lying in your grave, before that time comes. If you believe in God,’
+she said, ‘why cannot you leave it to Him to bring good out of all this
+evil? Does He need YOU to be made a martyr of? or will the world be lost
+without YOU?’
+
+“He said, ‘Wife, if my right hand be in a fire, shall I not pull it out?
+Shall I say, ‘God may bring good out of this evil,’ and let it burn?
+That Unknown that lies beyond us we know of no otherwise than through
+its manifestation in our own hearts; it works no otherwise upon the sons
+of men than through man. And shall I feel no bond binding me to the men
+to come, and desire no good or beauty for them--I, who am what I am,
+and enjoy what I enjoy, because for countless ages in the past men have
+lived and laboured, who lived not for themselves alone, and counted no
+costs? Would the great statue, the great poem, the great reform ever be
+accomplished, if men counted the cost and created for their own lives
+alone? And no man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. You
+cannot tell me not to love the men who shall be after me; a soft voice
+within me, I know not what, cries out ever, ‘Live for them as for your
+own children.’ When in the circle of my own small life all is dark, and
+I despair, hope springs up in me when I remember that something nobler
+and fairer may spring up in the spot where I now stand.’
+
+“And she said, ‘You want to put everyone against us! The other women
+will not call on me; and our church is more and more made up of poor
+people. Money holds by money. If your congregation were Dutchmen, I know
+you would be always preaching to love the Englishmen, and be kind to
+niggers. If they were Kaffirs you would always be telling them to
+help white men. You will never be on the side of the people who can do
+anything for us! You know the offer we had from--’
+
+“And he said, ‘Oh my wife, what are the Boer, and the Russian, and the
+Turk to me; am I responsible for their action? It is my own nation,
+mine, which I love as a man loves his own soul, whose acts touch me. I
+would that wherever our flag was planted the feeble or oppressed peoples
+of earth might gather under it, saying, ‘Under this banner is freedom
+and justice which knows no race or colour.’ I wish that on our banner
+were blazoned in large letters “Justice and Mercy”, and that in every
+new land which our feet touch, every son among us might see ever
+blazoned above his head that banner, and below it the great order:--“By
+this sign, Conquer!”--and that the pirate flag which some men now wave
+in its place, may be torn down and furled for ever! Shall I condone the
+action of some, simply because they happen to be of my own race, when in
+Bushman or Hottentot I would condemn it? Shall men belonging to one of
+the mightiest races of earth, creep softly on their bellies, to attack
+an unwarned neighbour; when even the Kaffir has again and again given
+notice of war, saying, ‘Be ready, on such and such a day I come to fight
+you?’ Is England’s power so broken, and our race so enfeebled, that we
+dare no longer to proclaim war; but must creep silently upon our bellies
+in the dark to stab, like a subject people to whom no other course is
+open? These men are English; but not English-MEN. When the men of our
+race fight, they go to war with a blazoned flag and the loud trumpet
+before them. It is because I am an Englishman that these things crush
+me. Better that ten thousand of us should lie dead and defeated on one
+battlefield, fighting for some great cause, and my own sons among
+them, than that those twelve poor boys should have fallen at Doornkop,
+fighting to fill up the pockets of those already oe’r-heavy with gold.’
+
+“And she said, ‘YOU, what does it matter what you feel or think; YOU
+will never be able to do anything!’
+
+“And he said, ‘Oh my wife, stand by me; do not crush me. For me in this
+matter there is no path but one on which light shines.’
+
+“And she said, ‘You are very unkind; you don’t care what the people say
+about us!’ and she wept bitterly, and went out of the room. But as soon
+as the door was shut, she dried her tears; and she said to herself, ‘Now
+he will never dare to preach such a sermon again. He dares never oppose
+me when once I have set down my foot.’
+
+“And the man spoke to no one, and went out alone in the veld. All the
+afternoon he walked up and down among the sand and low bushes; and I
+walked there beside him.
+
+“And when the evening came, he went back to his chapel. Many were
+absent, but the elders sat in their places, and his wife also was there.
+And the light shone on the empty benches. And when the time came he
+opened the old book of the Jews; and he turned the leaves and read:--‘If
+thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that
+are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, ‘Behold we knew it not!’ Doth not
+he that pondereth the heart consider it? and he that keepeth thy soul,
+doth he not know it?’
+
+“And he said, ‘This morning we considered the evils this land is
+suffering under at the hands of men whose aim is the attainment of
+wealth and power. Tonight we shall look at our own share in the matter.
+I think we shall realise that with us, and not with the men we have
+lifted up on high, lies the condemnation.’ Then his wife rose and went
+out, and others followed her; and the little man’s voice rolled among
+the empty benches; but he spoke on.
+
+“And when the service was over he went out. No elder came to the porch
+to greet him; but as he stood there one, he saw not whom, slipped a
+leaflet into his hand. He held it up, and read in the lamplight what was
+written on it in pencil. He crushed it up in his hand, as a man crushes
+that which has run a poisonous sting into him; then he dropped it on
+the earth as a man drops that he would forget. A fine drizzly rain was
+falling, and he walked up the street with his arms folded behind him,
+and his head bent. The people walked up the other side; and it seemed to
+him he was alone. But I walked behind him.”
+
+“And then,” asked Peter, seeing that the stranger was silent, “what
+happened to him after that?”
+
+“That was only last Sunday,” said the stranger.
+
+There was silence again for some seconds.
+
+Then Peter said, “Well, anyhow, at least he didn’t die!”
+
+The stranger crossed his hands upon his knees. “Peter Simon Halket,”
+ he said, “it is easier for a man to die than to stand alone. He who can
+stand alone can, also, when the need be, die.”
+
+Peter looked up wistfully into the stranger’s face. “I should not like
+to die myself,” he said, “not yet. I shall not be twenty-one till next
+birthday. I should like to see life first.”
+
+The stranger made no answer.
+
+Presently Peter said, “Are all the men of your company poor men?”
+
+The stranger waited a while before he answered; then he said,--“There
+have been rich men who have desired to join us. There was a young man
+once; and when he heard the conditions, he went away sorrowful, for he
+had great possessions.”
+
+There was silence again for a while.
+
+“Is it long since your company was started?” asked Peter.
+
+“There is no man living who can conceive of its age,” said the stranger.
+“Even here on this earth it began, when these hills were young, and
+these lichens had hardly shown their stains upon the rocks, and man
+still raised himself upwards with difficulty because the sinews in his
+thighs were weak. In those days, which men reck not of now, man, when
+he hungered, fed on the flesh of his fellow man and found it sweet. Yet
+even in those days it came to pass that there was one whose head was
+higher than her fellows and her thought keener, and, as she picked the
+flesh from a human skull, she pondered. And so it came to pass the next
+night, when men were gathered around the fire ready to eat, that she
+stole away, and when they went to the tree where the victim was bound,
+they found him gone. And they cried one to another, ‘She, only she, has
+done this, who has always said, ‘I like not the taste of man-flesh; men
+are too like me; I cannot eat them.’ ‘She is mad,’ they cried; ‘let us
+kill her!’ So, in those dim, misty times that men reck not of now, that
+they hardly believe in, that woman died. But in the heads of certain men
+and women a new thought had taken root; they said, ‘We also will not eat
+of her. There is something evil in the taste of human flesh.’ And ever
+after, when the fleshpots were filled with man-flesh, these stood aside,
+and half the tribe ate human flesh and half not; then, as the years
+passed, none ate.
+
+“Even in those days, which men reck not of now, when men fell easily
+open their hands and knees, they were of us on the earth. And, if you
+would learn a secret, even before man trod here, in the days when the
+dicynodont bent yearningly over her young, and the river-horse which you
+find now nowhere on earth’s surface, save buried in stone, called with
+love to his mate; and the birds whose footprints are on the rocks flew
+in the sunshine calling joyfully to one another--even in those days when
+man was not, the fore-dawn of this kingdom had broken on the earth. And
+still as the sun rises and sets and the planets journey round, we grow
+and grow.”
+
+The stranger rose from the fire, and stood upright: around him, and
+behind him, the darkness stood out.
+
+“All earth is ours. And the day shall come, when the stars, looking down
+on this little world, shall see no spot where the soil is moist and dark
+with the blood of man shed by his fellow man; the sun shall rise in the
+East and set in the West and shed his light across this little globe;
+and nowhere shall he see man crushed by his fellows. And they shall
+beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks:
+nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn
+war any more. And instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree;
+and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and man shall
+nowhere crush man on all the holy earth. Tomorrow’s sun shall rise,”
+ said the stranger, “and it shall flood these dark kopjes with light, and
+the rocks shall glint in it. Not more certain is that rising than the
+coming of that day. And I say to you that even here, in the land where
+now we stand, where today the cries of the wounded and the curses of
+revenge ring in the air; even here, in this land where man creeps on
+his belly to wound his fellow in the dark, and where an acre of gold
+is worth a thousand souls, and a reef of shining dirt is worth half a
+people, and the vultures are heavy with man’s flesh--even here that day
+shall come. I tell you, Peter Simon Halket, that here on the spot where
+now we stand shall be raised a temple. Man shall not gather in it to
+worship that which divides; but they shall stand in it shoulder to
+shoulder, white man with black, and the stranger with the inhabitant of
+the land; and the place shall be holy; for men shall say, ‘Are we not
+brethren and the sons of one Father?’”
+
+Peter Halket looked upward silently. And the stranger said: “Certain
+men slept upon a plain, and the night was chill and dark. And, as they
+slept, at that hour when night is darkest, one stirred. Far off to the
+eastward, through his half-closed eyelids, he saw, as it were, one faint
+line, thin as a hair’s width, that edged the hill tops. And he whispered
+in the darkness to his fellows: ‘The dawn is coming.’ But they, with
+fast-closed eyelids murmured, ‘He lies, there is no dawn.’
+
+“Nevertheless, day broke.”
+
+The stranger was silent. The fire burnt up in red tongues of flame that
+neither flickered nor flared in the still night air. Peter Halket crept
+near to the stranger.
+
+“When will that time be?” he whispered; “in a thousand years’ time?”
+
+And the stranger answered, “A thousand years are but as our yesterday’s
+journey, or as our watch tonight, which draws already to its close. See,
+piled, these rocks on which we now stand? The ages have been young and
+they have grown old since they have lain here. Half that time shall
+not pass before that time comes; I have seen its dawning already in the
+hearts of men.”
+
+Peter moved nearer, so that he almost knelt at the stranger’s feet: his
+gun lay on the ground at the other side of the fire.
+
+“I would like to be one of your men,” he said. “I am tired of belonging
+to the Chartered Company.”
+
+The stranger looked down gently. “Peter Simon Halket,” he said, “can you
+bear the weight?”
+
+And Peter said, “Give me work, that I may try.”
+
+There was silence for a time; then the stranger said, “Peter Simon
+Halket, take a message to England”--Peter Halket started--“Go to that
+great people and cry aloud to it: ‘Where is the sword was given into
+your hand, that with it you might enforce justice and deal out mercy?
+How came you to give it up into the hands of men whose search is gold,
+whose thirst is wealth, to whom men’s souls and bodies are counters in a
+game? How came you to give up the folk that were given into your hands,
+into the hand of the speculator and the gamester; as though they were
+dumb beasts who might be bought or sold?
+
+“‘Take back your sword, Great People--but wipe it first, lest some of
+the gold and blood stick to your hand.
+
+“‘What is this, I see!--the sword of the Great People, transformed to
+burrow earth for gold, as the snouts of swine for earth nuts! Have you
+no other use for it, Great Folk?
+
+“‘Take back your sword; and, when you have thoroughly cleansed it and
+wiped it of the blood and mire, then raise it to set free the oppressed
+of other climes.
+
+“‘Great Prince’s Daughter, take heed! You put your sword into the hands
+of recreant knights; they will dull its edge and mar its brightness,
+and, when your hour of need comes and you would put it into other hands,
+you will find its edge chipped and its point broken. Take heed! Take
+heed!’
+
+“Cry to the wise men of England: ‘You, who in peace and calm in
+shaded chambers ponder on all things in heaven and earth, and take all
+knowledge for your province, have you no time to think of this? To whom
+has England given her power? How do the men wield it who have filched it
+from her? Say not, What have we to do with folk across the waters; have
+we not matter enough for thought in our own land? Where the brain of
+a nation has no time to go, there should its hands never be sent to
+labour: where the power of a people goes, there must its intellect and
+knowledge go, to guide it. Oh, you who sit at ease, studying past and
+future--and forget the present--you have no right to sit at ease knowing
+nothing of the working of the powers you have armed and sent to work on
+men afar. Where is your nation’s sword--you men of thought?’
+
+“Cry to the women of England: ‘You, who repose in sumptuous houses, with
+children on your knees; think not it is only the rustling of the soft
+draped curtains, or the whistling of the wind, you hear. Listen! May it
+not be the far off cry of those your sword governs, creeping towards
+you across wide oceans till it pierces even into your inmost sanctuary?
+Listen!
+
+“For the womanhood of a dominant people has not accomplished all its
+labour when it has borne its children and fed them at its breast: there
+cries to it also from over seas and across continents the voice of the
+child-peoples--‘Mother-heart, stand for us!’ It would be better for you
+that your wombs should be barren and that your race should die out; than
+that you should listen, and give no answer.’”
+
+The stranger lifted his hands upwards as he spoke, and Peter saw there
+were the marks of old wounds in both.
+
+“Cry aloud to the working men and women of England: ‘You, who for ages
+cried out because the heel of your masters was heavy on you; and who
+have said, ‘We curse the kings that sit at ease, and care not who
+oppresses the folk, so their coffers be full and their bellies
+satisfied, and they be not troubled with the trouble of rule’; you, who
+have taken the king’s rule from him and sit enthroned within his seat;
+is his sin not yours today? If men should add but one hour to your day’s
+labour, or make but one fraction dearer the bread you eat, would you not
+rise up as one man? Yet, what is dealt out to men beyond seas whom you
+rule wounds you not. Nay, have you not sometimes said, as kings of old:
+‘It matters not who holds out our sword, marauder or speculator, so he
+calls it ours, we must cloak up the evil it has done!’ Think you, no
+other curses rise to heaven but yours? Where is your sword? Into whose
+hand has it fallen? Take it quickly and cleanse it!’”
+
+Peter Halket crouched, looking upwards; then he cried: “Master, I cannot
+give that message, I am a poor unlearn’d man. And if I should go to
+England and cry aloud, they would say, ‘Who is this, who comes preaching
+to a great people? Is not his mother with us, and a washerwoman; and was
+not his father a day labourer at two shillings a day?’ and they would
+laugh me to scorn. And, in truth, the message is so long I could not
+well remember it; give me other work to do.”
+
+And the stranger said, “Take a message to the men and women of this
+land. Go, from the Zambezi to the sea, and cry to its white men and
+women, and say: ‘I saw a wide field, and in it were two fair beasts.
+Wide was the field about them and rich was the earth with sweet scented
+herbs, and so abundant was the pasturage that hardly might they consume
+all that grew about them: and the two were like one to another, for
+they were the sons of one mother. And as I looked, I saw, far off to the
+northward, a speck within the sky, so small it was, and so high it was,
+that the eye scarce might mark it. Then it came nearer and hovered over
+the spot where the two beasts fed:--and its neck was bare, and its
+beak was hooked, and its talons were long, and its wings strong. And it
+hovered over the field where the two beasts were; and I saw it settle
+down upon a great white stone; and it waited. And I saw more specks to
+the northward, and more and more came onward to join him who sat upon
+the stone. And some hovered over the beasts, and some sharpened their
+beaks on the stones; and some walked in and out between the beasts’
+legs. And I saw that they were waiting for something.
+
+“‘Then he who first came flew from one of the beasts to the other, and
+sat upon their necks, and put his beak within their ears. And he flew
+from one to the other and flapped his wings in their faces till the
+beasts were blinded, and each believed it was his fellow who attacked
+him. And they fell to, and fought; they gored one another’s sides till
+the field was red with blood and the ground shook beneath them. The
+birds sat by and watched; and when the blood flowed they walked round
+and round. And when the strength of the two beasts was exhausted they
+fell to earth. Then the birds settled down upon them, and feasted; till
+their maws were full, and their long bare necks were wet; and they stood
+with their beaks deep in the entrails of the two dead beasts; and looked
+out with their keen bright eyes from above them. And he who was king of
+all plucked out the eyes, and fed on the hearts of the dead beasts. And
+when his maw was full, so that he could eat no more, he sat on his stone
+hard by and flapped his great wings.’
+
+“Peter Simon Halket, cry to the white men and women of South Africa:
+‘You have a goodly land; you and your children’s children shall scarce
+fill it; though you should stretch out your arms to welcome each
+stranger who comes to live and labour with you. You are the twin
+branches of one tree; you are the sons of one mother. Is this goodly
+land not wide enough for you, that you should rend each other’s flesh
+at the bidding of those who will wet their beaks within both your
+vitals?--Look up, see, they circle in the air above you!’”
+
+Almost Peter Halket started and looked upward; but there was only the
+black sky of Mashonaland over his head.
+
+The stranger stood silent looking downward into the fire. Peter Halket
+half clasped his arms about his knees.
+
+“My master,” he cried, “how can I take this message? The Dutchmen of
+South Africa will not listen to me, they will say I am an Englishman.
+And the Englishmen will say: ‘Who is this fellow who comes preaching
+peace, peace, peace? Has he not been a year in the country and he has
+not a share in a single company? Can anything he says be worth hearing?
+If he were a man of any sense he would have made five thousand pounds at
+least.’ And they will not listen to me. Give me another labour!”
+
+And the stranger said: “Take a message to one man. Find him, whether he
+sleep or wake, whether he eat or drink; and say to him: ‘Where are the
+souls of the men that you have bought?’
+
+“And if he shall answer you and say: ‘I bought no men’s souls! The souls
+that I bought were the souls of dogs?’ Then ask him this question, say
+to him, ‘Where are the--’
+
+“And if he cry out, ‘You lie, you lie! I know what you are going to say.
+What do I know of envoys? Was I ever afraid of the British Government?
+It is all a lie!’ Then question him no further. But say: ‘There was a
+rushlight once. It flickered and flared, and it guttered down, and went
+out--and no man heeded it: it was only a rushlight.
+
+“‘And there was a light once; men set it on high within a lighthouse,
+that it might yield light to all souls at sea; that afar off they might
+see its steady light and find harbour, and escape the rocks.
+
+“‘And that light flickered and flared, as it listed. It went this way
+and it went that; it burnt blue, and green, and red; now it disappeared
+altogether, and then it burnt up again. And men, far out at sea, kept
+their eyes fixed where they knew the light should be: saying, ‘We are
+safe; the great light will lead us when we near the rocks.’ And on
+dark nights men drifted nearer and nearer; and in the stillness of the
+midnight they struck on the lighthouse rocks and went down at its feet.
+
+“‘What now shall be done to that light, in that it was not a rushlight;
+in that it was set on high by the hands of men, and in that men trusted
+it? Shall it not be put out?’
+
+“And if he shall answer, saying, ‘What are men to me? they are fools,
+all fools! Let them die!’--tell him again this story: ‘There was a
+streamlet once: it burst forth from beneath the snow on a mountain’s
+crown; and the snow made a cove over it. It ran on pure and blue and
+clear as the sky above it, and the banks of snow made its cradle. Then
+it came to a spot where the snow ended; and two ways lay before it by
+which it might journey; one, on the mountain ridges, past rocks and
+stones, and down long sunlit slopes to the sea; and the other, down a
+chasm. And the stream hesitated: it twirled and purled, and went this
+way and went that. It MIGHT have been, that it would have forced its
+way past rocks and ridges and along mountain slopes, and made a path for
+itself where no path had been; the banks would have grown green, and the
+mountain daisy would have grown beside it; and all night the stars would
+have looked at their faces in it; and down the long sunny slopes the sun
+would have played on it by day; and the wood dove would have built her
+nest in the trees beside it; and singing, singing, always singing, it
+would have made its way at last to the great sea, whose far-off call all
+waters hear.
+
+“‘But it hesitated.--It might have been, that, had but some hand been
+there to move but one stone from its path, it would have forced its way
+past rocks and ridges, and found its way to the great sea--it might have
+been! But no hand was there. The streamlet gathered itself together,
+and (it might be, that it was even in its haste to rush onwards to the
+sea!)--it made one leap into the abyss.
+
+“‘The rocks closed over it. Nine hundred fathoms deep, in a still, dark
+pool it lay. The green lichen hung from the rocks. No sunlight came
+there, and the stars could not look down at night. The pool lay still
+and silent. Then, because it was alive and could not rest, it gathered
+its strength together, through fallen earth and broken debris it oozed
+its way silently on; and it crept out in a deep valley; the mountains
+closed it around. And the streamlet laughed to itself, ‘Ha, ha! I shall
+make a great lake here; a sea!’ And it oozed, and it oozed, and it
+filled half the plain. But no lake came--only a great marsh--because
+there was no way outwards, and the water rotted. The grass died out
+along its edges; and the trees dropped their leaves and rotted in the
+water; and the wood dove who had built her nest there flew up to the
+mountains, because her young ones died. And the toads sat on the stones
+and dropped their spittle in the water; and the reeds were yellow that
+grew along the edge. And at night, a heavy, white fog gathered over the
+water, so that the stars could not see through it; and by day a fine
+white mist hung over it, and the sunbeams could not play on it. And no
+man knew that once the marsh had leapt forth clear and blue from under
+a hood of snow on the mountain’s top: aye, and that the turning of one
+stone might have caused that it had run on and on, and mingled its song
+with the sea’s song for ever.’”
+
+The stranger was silent for a while.
+
+Then he said, “Should he answer you and say, ‘What do I care! What are
+coves and mountain tops to me? Gold is real, and the power to crush men
+within my hand’; tell him no further.
+
+“But if by some chance he should listen, then, say this one thing to
+him, clearly in the ear, that he may not fail to hear it: ‘The morning
+may break grey, and the midday be dark and stormy; but the glory of the
+evening’s sunset may wash out for ever the remembrance of the morning’s
+dullness, and the darkness of the noon. So that all men shall say, ‘Ah,
+for the beauty of that day!’--For the stream that has once descended
+there is no path upwards.--It is never too late for the soul of a man.’
+
+“And if he should laugh, and say: ‘You fool, a man may remake himself
+entirely before twenty; he may reshape himself before thirty; but after
+forty he is fixed. Shall I, who for forty-three years have sought money
+and power, seek for anything else now? You want me to be Jesus Christ, I
+suppose! How can I be myself and another man?’ Then answer him: ‘Deep in
+the heart of every son of man lies an angel; but some have their wings
+folded. Wake yours! He is larger and stronger than another man’s; mount
+up with him!’
+
+“But if he curses you, and says, ‘I have eight millions of money, and I
+care neither for God nor man!’--then make no answer, but stoop and write
+before him.” The stranger bent down and wrote with his finger in the
+white ashes of the fire. Peter Halket bent forward, and he saw the two
+words the stranger had written.
+
+The stranger said: “Say to him: ‘Though you should seek to make that
+name immortal in this land; and should write it in gold dust, and set it
+with diamonds, and cement it with human blood, shed from the Zambezi
+to the sea, yet--.” The stranger passed his foot over the words; Peter
+Halket looked down, and he saw only a bed of smooth white ashes where
+the name had been.
+
+The stranger said: “And if he should curse yet further, and say, ‘There
+is not one man nor woman in South Africa I cannot buy with my money!
+When I have the Transvaal, I shall buy God Almighty Himself, if I care
+to!’
+
+“Then say to him this one thing only, ‘Thy money perish with thee!’ and
+leave him.”
+
+There was a dead silence for a moment. Then the stranger stretched forth
+his hand. “Yet in that leaving him, remember;--It is not the act, but
+the will, which marks the soul of the man. He who has crushed a nation
+sins no more than he who rejoices in the death throe of the meanest
+creature. The stagnant pool is not less poisonous drop for drop than the
+mighty swamp, though its reach be smaller. He who has desired to be
+and accomplish what this man has been and accomplished, is as this man;
+though he have lacked the power to perform. Nay, remember this one thing
+more:--Certain sons of God are born on earth, named by men Children
+of Genius. In early youth each stands at the parting of the way and
+chooses; he bears his gift for others or for himself. But forget this
+never, whatever his choice may be; that there is laid on him a burden
+that is laid not on others--all space is open to him, and his choice is
+infinite--and if he falls beneath it, let men weep rather than curse,
+for he was born a Son of God.”
+
+There was silence again. Then Peter Halket clasped his arms about the
+stranger’s feet. “My master,” he cried, “I dare not take that message.
+It is not that men may say, ‘Here is Trooper Peter Halket, whom we all
+know, a man who kept women and shot niggers, turned prophet.’ But it is,
+that it is true. Have I not wished--” and Peter Halket would have poured
+out all his soul; but the stranger prevented him.
+
+“Peter Simon Halket,” he said, “is it the trumpet which gives forth
+the call to battle, whether it be battered tin or gilded silver, which
+boots? Is it not the call? What and if I should send my message by
+a woman or a child: shall truth be less truth because the bearer is
+despised? Is it the mouth that speaks or the word that is spoken which
+is eternal? Nevertheless, if you will have it so, go, and say, ‘I, Peter
+Halket, sinner among you all, who have desired women and gold, who have
+loved myself and hated my fellow, I--’” The stranger looked down at him,
+and placed his hand gently on his head. “Peter Simon Halket,” he said,
+“a harder task I give you than any which has been laid upon you. In that
+small spot where alone on earth your will rules, bring there into being
+the kingdom today. Love your enemies; do good to them that hate you.
+Walk ever forward, looking not to the right hand or the left. Heed not
+what men shall say of you. Succour the oppressed; deliver the captive.
+If thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he is athirst give him drink.”
+
+A curious warmth and gladness stole over Peter Halket as he knelt;
+it was as, when a little child, his mother folded him to her: he saw
+nothing more about him but a soft bright light. Yet in it he heard a
+voice cry, “Because thou hast loved mercy--and hated oppression--”
+
+When Trooper Peter Halket raised himself, he saw the figure of the
+stranger passing from him. He cried, “My Master, let me go with you.”
+ But the figure did not turn. And, as it passed into the darkness, it
+seemed to Peter Halket that the form grew larger and larger: and as it
+descended the further side of the kopje it seemed that for one instant
+he still saw the head with a pale, white light upon it: then it
+vanished.
+
+And Trooper Peter Halket sat alone upon the kopje.
+
+
+
+Chapter II.
+
+It was a hot day. The sun poured down its rays over the scattered trees,
+and stunted bush, and long grass, and over the dried up river beds. Far
+in the blue, so high the eye could scarcely mark them, vultures were
+flying southward, where forty miles off kraals had been destroyed and
+two hundred black carcasses were lying in the sun.
+
+Under a group of tall straggling trees among the grass and low scrub,
+on the banks of an almost dried up river bed, a small camp had been
+pitched.
+
+The party had lost their mules, and pending their recovery had already
+been there seven days. The three cart loads of provisions they were
+conveying to the large camp were drawn up under the trees and had a sail
+thrown across them to form a shelter for some of the men; while on the
+other side of the cleared and open space that formed the camp, a smaller
+sail was thrown across two poles forming a rough tent; and away to the
+left, a little cut off from the rest of the camp by some low bushes,
+was the bell-shaped tent of the captain, under a tall tree. Before
+the bell-shaped tent stood a short stunted tree; its thick white stem
+gnarled and knotted; while two stunted misshapen branches, like arms,
+stretched out on either side.
+
+Before this tree, up and down, with his gun upon his arm, his head
+bent and his eyes fixed on the ground, while the hot sun blazed on his
+shoulders, walked a man.
+
+Three or four fires were burning about the camp in different parts,
+three cooking the mealies and rice which formed the diet of the men,
+their stock of tinned meats having been exhausted; while the fourth,
+which was watched by a native boy, contained the more appetising meal of
+the Captain.
+
+Most of the men were out of camp; the coloured boys having gone to fetch
+the mules, which had been discovered in the hills a few miles off, and
+were expected to arrive in the evening; and the white men had gone out
+to see what game they could bring down with their guns to flavour
+the mealie pots, or to reconnoitre the country; though all native
+habitations had been destroyed within a radius of thirty miles, and the
+land was as bare of black men as a child’s hand of hair; and even the
+beasts seemed to have vanished.
+
+In the shade of the tent, formed of the canvas across two posts, lay
+three white men, whose work it was to watch the pots and guard the camp.
+They were all three Colonial Englishmen, and lay on the ground on their
+stomachs, passing the time by carrying on a desultory conversation,
+or taking a few whiffs, slowly, and with care, from their pipes, for
+tobacco was precious in the camp.
+
+Under some bushes a few yards off lay a huge trooper, whose nationality
+was uncertain, but who was held to hail from some part of the British
+Isles, and who had travelled round the world. He was currently reported
+to have done three years’ labour for attempted rape in Australia, but
+nothing certain was known regarding his antecedents. He had been up on
+guard half the night, and was now taking his rest lying on his back with
+his arm thrown over his face; but a slight movement could be noted in
+his jaw as he slowly chewed a piece of tobacco; and occasionally when
+he turned it round the mouth opened, and disclosed two rows of broken
+yellow stumps set in very red gums.
+
+The three Colonial Englishmen took no notice of him. Two, who were
+slowly smoking, were of the large and powerful build, and somewhat loose
+set about the shoulders, which is common among Colonial Europeans of the
+third generation, whether Dutch or English, and had the placidity and
+general good temper of expression which commonly marks the Colonial
+European who grows up beyond the range of the cities. The third was
+smaller and more wiry and of an unusually nervous type, with aquiline
+nose, and sallow hatchet face, with a somewhat discontented expression.
+He was holding forth, while his companions smoked and listened.
+
+“Now what I say is this,” he brought his hand down on the red sand;
+“here we are with about one half teaspoon of Dop given us at night,
+while he has ten empty champagne bottles lying behind his tent. And we
+have to live on the mealies we’re convoying for the horses, while he
+has pati and beef, and lives like a lord! It’s all very well for the
+regulars; they know what they’re in for, and they’ve got gentlemen over
+them anyhow, and one can stomach anything if you know what kind of a
+fellow you’ve got over you. English officers are gentlemen, anyhow; or
+if one was under Selous now--”
+
+“Oh, Selous’s a MAN!” broke out the other two, taking their pipes from
+their mouths.
+
+“Yes, well, that’s what I say. But these fellows, who couldn’t do as
+farmers, and couldn’t do as shopkeepers, and God knows what else; and
+their friends in England didn’t want to have them; they’re sent out here
+to boss it over us! It’s a damned shame! Why, I want to know, amn’t I as
+good as any of these fellows, who come swelling it about here? Friends
+got money, I suppose!” He cast his sharp glance over towards the bell
+tent. “If they gave us real English officers now--”
+
+“Ah!” said the biggest of his companions, who, in spite of his huge
+form, had something of the simplicity and good nature of a child in his
+handsome face; “it’s because you’re not a big enough swell, you know!
+He’ll be a colonel, or a general, before we’ve done with him. I call
+them all generals or colonels up here; it’s safest, you know; if they’re
+not that today they will be tomorrow!”
+
+This was intended as a joke, and in that hot weather, and in that dull
+world, anything was good enough to laugh at: the third man smiled, but
+the first speaker remained serious.
+
+“I only know this,” he said, “I’d teach these fellows a lesson, if any
+one belonging to me had been among the people they left to be murdered
+here, while they went gallivanting to the Transvaal. If my mother or
+sister had been killed here, I’d have taken a pistol and blown out the
+brains of the great Panjandrum, and the little ones after him. Fine
+administration of a country, this, to invite people to come in and live
+here, and then take every fighting man out of the country on a gold
+hunting marauding expedition to the Transvaal, and leave us to face
+the bitter end. I look upon every man and woman who was killed here as
+murdered by the Chartered Company.”
+
+“Well, Jameson only did what he was told. He had to obey orders, like
+the rest of us. He didn’t make the plan, and he’s got the punishment.”
+
+“What business had he to listen? What’s all this fine administration
+they talk of? It’s six years since I came to this country, and I’ve
+worked like a nigger ever since I came, and what have I, or any men
+who’ve worked hard at real, honest farming, got for it? Everything in
+the land is given away for the benefit of a few big folks over the water
+or swells out here. If England took over the Chartered Company tomorrow,
+what would she find?--everything of value in the land given over to
+private concessionaires--they’ll line their pockets if the whole land
+goes to pot! It’ll be the jackals eating all the flesh off the horse’s
+bones, and calling the lion in to lick the bones.”
+
+“Oh, you wait a bit and you’ll be squared,” said the handsome man. “I’ve
+been here five years and had lots of promises, though I haven’t got
+anything else yet; but I expect it to come some day, so I keep my mouth
+shut! If they asked me to sign a paper, that Mr. Over-the-Way”--he
+nodded towards the bell tent--“never got drunk or didn’t know how to
+swear, I’d sign it, if there was a good dose of squaring to come after
+it. I could stand a good lot of that sort of thing--squaring--if it
+would only come my way.”
+
+The men laughed in a dreary sort of way, and the third man, who had
+not spoken yet, rolled round on to his back, and took the pipe from his
+mouth.
+
+“I tell you what,” said the keen man, “those of us up here who have got
+a bit of land and are trying honestly and fairly to work, are getting
+pretty sick of this humbugging fighting. If we’d had a few men like the
+Curries and Bowkers of the old days up here from the first, all this
+would never have happened. And there’s no knowing when a reason won’t
+turn up for keeping the bloody thing on or stopping it off for a
+time, to break out just when one’s settled down to work. It’s a damned
+convenient thing to have a war like this to turn on and off.”
+
+Slowly the third man keeled round on to his stomach again: “Let
+resignation wait. We fight the Matabele again tomorrow,” he said,
+sententiously.
+
+A low titter ran round the group. Even the man under the bushes, though
+his eyes were still closed and his arm across his face, let his mouth
+relax a little, and showed his yellow teeth.
+
+“I’m always expecting,” said the big handsome man, “to have a paper come
+round, signed by all the nigger chiefs, saying how much they love the
+B.S.A. Company, and how glad they are the Panjandrum has got them, and
+how awfully good he is to them; and they’re going to subscribe to the
+brazen statue. There’s nothing a man can’t be squared to do.”
+
+The third man lay on his back again, lazily examining his hand, which he
+held above his face. “What’s that in the Bible,” he said, slowly, “about
+the statue, whose thighs and belly were of brass, and its feet of mud?”
+
+“I don’t know much about the Bible,” said the keen man, “I’m going to
+see if my pot isn’t boiling over. Won’t yours burn?”
+
+“No, I asked the Captain’s boy to keep an eye on it--but I expect he
+won’t. Do you put the rice in with the mealies?”
+
+“Got to; I’ve got no other pot. And the fellows don’t object. It’s a
+tasty variety, you know!”
+
+The keen-faced man slouched away across the square to where his fire
+burnt; and presently the other man rose and went, either to look at his
+own pot or sleep under the carts; and the large Colonial man was left
+alone. His fire was burning satisfactorily about fifty feet off, and
+he folded his arms on the ground and rested his forehead on them, and
+watched lazily the little black ants that ran about in the red sand,
+just under his nose.
+
+A great stillness settled down on the camp. Now and again a stick
+cracked in the fires, and the cicadas cried aloud in the tree stems;
+but except where the solitary paced up and down before the little
+flat-topped tree in front of the captain’s tent, not a creature stirred
+in the whole camp; and the snores of the trooper under the bushes might
+be heard half across the camp.
+
+The intense midday heat had settled down.
+
+At last there was the sound of someone breaking through the long grass
+and bushes which had only been removed for a few feet round the camp,
+and the figure of a man emerged bearing in one hand a gun, and in the
+other a bird which he had shot. He was evidently an Englishman, and not
+long from Europe, by the bloom of the skin, which was perceptible in
+spite of the superficial tan. His face was at the moment flushed with
+heat; but the clear blue eyes and delicate features lost none of their
+sensitive refinement.
+
+He came up to the Colonial, and dropped the bird before him. “That is
+all I’ve got,” he said.
+
+He threw himself also down on the ground, and put his gun under the
+loose flap of the tent.
+
+The Colonial raised his head; and without taking his elbows from the
+ground took up the bird. “I’ll put it into the pot; it’ll give it the
+flavour of something except weevily mealies”; he said, and fell to
+plucking it.
+
+The Englishman took his hat off, and lifted the fine damp hair from his
+forehead.
+
+“Knocked up, eh?” said the Colonial, glancing kindly up at him. “I’ve a
+few drops in my flask still.”
+
+“Oh, no, I can stand it well enough. It’s only a little warm.” He gave
+a slight cough, and laid his head down sideways on his arm. His eyes
+watched mechanically the Colonial’s manipulation of the bird. He had
+left England to escape phthisis; and he had gone to Mashonaland because
+it was a place where he could earn an open-air living, and save his
+parents from the burden of his support.
+
+“What’s Halket doing over there?” he asked suddenly, raising his head.
+
+“Weren’t you here this morning?” asked the Colonial. “Didn’t you know
+they’d had a devil of a row?”
+
+“Who?” asked the Englishman, half raising himself on his elbows.
+
+“Halket and the Captain.” The Colonial paused in the plucking. “My God,
+you never saw anything like it!”
+
+The Englishman sat upright now, and looked keenly over the bushes where
+Halket’s bent head might be seen as he paced to and fro.
+
+“What’s he doing out there in this blazing sun?”
+
+“He’s on guard,” said the Colonial. “I thought you were here when it
+happened. It’s the best thing I ever saw or heard of in my whole life!”
+ He rolled half over on his side and laughed at the remembrance. “You
+see, some of the men went down into the river, to look for fresh pools
+of water, and they found a nigger, hidden away in a hole in the bank,
+not five hundred yards from here! They found the bloody rascal by a
+little path he tramped down to the water, trodden hard, just like a
+porcupine’s walk. They got him in the hole like an aardvark, with a bush
+over the mouth, so you couldn’t see it. He’d evidently been there a long
+time, the floor was full of bones of fish he’d caught in the pool, and
+there was a bit of root like a stick half gnawed through. He’d been
+potted, and got two bullet wounds in the thigh; but he could walk
+already. It’s evident he was just waiting till we were gone, to clear
+off after his people. He’d got that beastly scurvy look a nigger gets
+when he hasn’t had anything to eat for a long time.
+
+“Well, they hauled him up before the Captain, of course; and he blew
+and swore, and said the nigger was a spy, and was to be hanged tomorrow;
+he’d hang him tonight, only the big troop might catch us up this
+evening, so he’d wait to hear what the Colonel said; but if they didn’t
+come he’d hang him first thing tomorrow morning, or have him shot, as
+sure as the sun rose. He made the fellows tie him up to that little tree
+before his tent, with riems round his legs, and riems round his waist,
+and a riem round his neck.”
+
+“What did the native say?” asked the Englishman.
+
+“Oh, he didn’t say anything. There wasn’t a soul in the camp could have
+understood him if he had. The coloured boys don’t know his language. I
+expect he’s one of those bloody fellows we hit the day we cleared the
+bush out yonder; but how he got down that bank with his leg in the state
+it must have been, I don’t know. He didn’t try to fight when they caught
+him; just stared in front of him--fright, I suppose. He must have been a
+big strapping devil before he was taken down.
+
+“Well, I tell you, we’d just got him fixed up, and the Captain was just
+going into his tent to have a drink, and we chaps were all standing
+round, when up steps Halket, right before the Captain, and pulls his
+front lock--you know the way he has? Oh, my God, my God, if you could
+have seen it! I’ll never forget it to my dying day!” The Colonial seemed
+bursting with internal laughter. “He begins, ‘Sir, may I speak to you?’
+in a formal kind of way, like a fellow introducing a deputation; and
+then all of a sudden he starts off--oh, my God, you never heard such a
+thing! It was like a boy in Sunday-school saying up a piece of Scripture
+he’s learnt off by heart, and got all ready beforehand, and he’s not
+going to be stopped till he gets to the end of it.”
+
+“What did he say,” asked the Englishman.
+
+“Oh, he started, How did we know this nigger was a spy at all; it would
+be a terrible thing to kill him if we weren’t quite sure; perhaps he was
+hiding there because he was wounded. And then he broke out that, after
+all, these niggers were men fighting for their country; we would fight
+against the French if they came and took England from us; and the
+niggers were brave men, ‘please sir’--(every five minutes he’d pull his
+forelock, and say, ‘please sir!’)--‘and if we have to fight against them
+we ought to remember they’re fighting for freedom; we shouldn’t shoot
+wounded prisoners when they were black if we wouldn’t shoot them if they
+were white!’ And then he broke out pure unmitigated Exeter Hall! You
+never heard anything like it! All men were brothers, and God loved a
+black man as well as a white; Mashonas and Matabele were poor ignorant
+folk, and we had to take care of them. And then he started out, that we
+ought to let this man go; we ought to give him food for the road, and
+tell him to go back to his people, and tell them we hadn’t come to take
+their land but to teach them and love them. ‘It’s hard to love a nigger,
+Captain, but we must try it; we must try it!’--And every five minutes
+he’d break out with, ‘And I think this is a man I know, Captain; I’m
+not sure, but I think he comes from up Lo Magundis way!’--as if any born
+devil cared whether a bloody nigger came from Lo Magundis or anywhere
+else! I’m sure he said it fifteen times. And then he broke out, ‘I don’t
+mean that I’m better than you or anybody else, Captain; I’m as bad a man
+as any in camp, and I know it.’ And off he started, telling us all the
+sins he’d ever committed; and he kept on, ‘I’m an unlearned, ignorant
+man, Captain; but I must stand by this nigger; he’s got no one else!’
+And then he says--‘If you let me take him up to Lo Magundis, sir, I’m
+not afraid; and I’ll tell the people there that it’s not their land and
+their women that we want, it’s them to be our brothers and love us. If
+you’ll only let me go, sir, I’ll go and make peace; give the man to me,
+sir!’” The Colonial shook with laughter.
+
+“What did the Captain say?” asked the Englishman.
+
+“The Captain; well, you know the smallest thing sets him off swearing
+all round the world; but he just stood there with his arms hanging down
+at each side of him, and his eyes staring, and his face getting redder
+and redder: and all he could say was, ‘My Gawd! my Gawd!’ I thought
+he’d burst. And Halket stood there looking straight in front of him, as
+though he didn’t see a soul of us all there.”
+
+“What did the Captain do?”
+
+“Oh, as soon as Halket turned away he started swearing, but he got the
+tail of one oath hooked on to the head of another. It was nearly as good
+as Halket himself. And when he’d finished and got sane a bit, he said
+Halket was to walk up and down there all day and keep watch on the
+nigger. And he gave orders that if the big troop didn’t come up tonight,
+that he was to be potted first thing in the morning, and that Halket was
+to shoot him.”
+
+The Englishman started: “What did Halket say?”
+
+“Nothing. He’s been walking there with his gun all day.”
+
+The Englishman watched with his clear eyes the spot where Halket’s head
+appeared and disappeared.
+
+“Is the nigger hanging there now?”
+
+“Yes. The Captain said no one was to go near him, or give him anything
+to eat or drink all day: but--” The Colonial glanced round where the
+trooper lay under the bushes; and then lowering his voice added, “This
+morning, a couple of hours ago, Halket sent the Captain’s coloured boy
+to ask me for a drink of water. I thought it was for Halket himself, and
+the poor devil must be hot walking there in the sun, so I sent him the
+water out of my canvas bag. I went along afterwards to see what had
+become of my mug; the boy had gone, and there, straight in front of the
+Captain’s tent, before the very door, was Halket letting that bloody
+nigger drink out of my mug. The riem was so tight round his neck he
+couldn’t drink but slowly, and there was Halket holding it up to him! If
+the Captain had looked out! W-h-e-w! I wouldn’t have been Halket!”
+
+“Do you think he will try to make Halket do it?” asked the Englishman.
+
+“Of course he will. He’s the Devil in; and Halket had better not make a
+fuss about it, or it’ll be the worse for him.”
+
+“His time’s up tomorrow evening!”
+
+“Yes, but not tomorrow morning. And I wouldn’t make a row about it if I
+was Halket. It doesn’t do to fall out with the authorities here. What’s
+one nigger more or less? He’ll get shot some other way, or die of
+hunger, if we don’t do it.”
+
+“It’s hardly sport to shoot a man tied up neck and legs,” said the
+Englishman; his finely drawn eyebrows contracting and expanding a
+little.
+
+“Oh, they don’t feel, these niggers, not as we should, you know. I’ve
+seen a man going to be shot, looking full at the guns, and falling
+like that!--without a sound. They’ve no feeling, these niggers; I don’t
+suppose they care much whether they live or die, not as we should, you
+know.”
+
+The Englishman’s eyes were still fixed on the bushes, behind which
+Halket’s head appeared and disappeared.
+
+“They have no right to order Halket to do it--and he will not do it!”
+ said the Englishman slowly.
+
+“You’re not going to be such a fool as to step in, are you?” said the
+Colonial, looking curiously at him. “It doesn’t pay. I’ve made up my
+mind never to speak whatever happens. What’s the good? Suppose one were
+to make a complaint now about this affair with Halket, if he’s made to
+shoot the nigger against his will; what would come of it? There’d be
+half-a-dozen fellows here squared to say what headquarters wanted--not
+to speak of a fellow like that”--turning his thumb in the direction of
+the sleeping trooper--“who are paid to watch. I believe he reports on
+the Captain himself to the big headquarters. All one’s wires are edited
+before they go down; only what the Company wants to go, go through.
+There are many downright good fellows in this lot; but how many of us
+are there, do you think, who could throw away all chance of ever making
+anything in Mashonaland, for the sake of standing by Halket; even if he
+had a real row with the Company? I’ve a great liking for Halket myself,
+he’s a real good fellow, and he’s done me many a good turn--took my
+watch only last night, because I was off colour; I’d do anything for him
+in reason. But, I say this flatly, I couldn’t and wouldn’t fly in the
+face of the authorities for him or anyone else. I’ve my own girl waiting
+for me down in the Colony, and she’s been waiting for me these five
+years. And whether I’m able to marry her or not depends on how I stand
+with the Company: and I say, flatly, I’m not going to fall out with it.
+I came here to make money, and I mean to make it! If other people like
+to run their heads against stone walls, let them: but they mustn’t
+expect me to follow them. This isn’t a country where a man can say what
+he thinks.”
+
+The Englishman rested his elbows on the ground. “And the Union Jack is
+supposed to be flying over us.”
+
+“Yes, with a black bar across it for the Company,” laughed the Colonial.
+
+“Do you ever have the nightmare?” asked the Englishman suddenly.
+
+“I? Oh yes, sometimes”; he looked curiously at his companion; “when I’ve
+eaten too much, I get it.”
+
+“I always have it since I came up here,” said the Englishman. “It is
+that a vast world is resting on me--a whole globe: and I am a midge
+beneath it. I try to raise it, and I cannot. So I lie still under
+it--and let it crush me!”
+
+“It’s curious you should have the nightmare so up here,” said the
+Colonial; “one gets so little to eat.”
+
+There was a silence: he was picking the little fine feathers from the
+bird, and the Englishman was watching the ants.
+
+“Mind you,” the Colonial said at last, “I don’t say that in this case
+the Captain was to blame; Halket made an awful ass of himself. He’s
+never been quite right since that time he got lost and spent the night
+out on the kopje. When we found him in the morning he was in a kind of
+dead sleep; we couldn’t wake him; yet it wasn’t cold enough for him to
+have been frozen. He’s never been the same man since; queer, you know;
+giving his rations away to the coloured boys, and letting the other
+fellows have his dot of brandy at night; and keeping himself sort of
+apart to himself, you know. The other fellows think he’s got a touch of
+fever on, caught wandering about in the long grass that day. But I don’t
+think it’s that; I think it’s being alone in the veld that’s got hold of
+him. Man, have you ever been out like that, alone in the veld, night
+and day, and not a soul to speak to? I have; and I tell you, if I’d been
+left there three days longer I’d have gone mad or turned religious. Man,
+it’s the nights, with the stars up above you, and the dead still all
+around. And you think, and think, and think! You remember all kinds of
+things you’ve never thought of for years and years. I used to talk to
+myself at last, and make believe it was another man. I was out seven
+days: and he was only out one night. But I think it’s the loneliness
+that got hold of him. Man, those stars are awful; and that stillness
+that comes toward morning!” He stood up. “It’s a great pity, because
+he’s as good a fellow as ever was. But perhaps he’ll come all right.”
+
+He walked away towards the pot with the bird in his hand. When he had
+gone the Englishman turned round on to his back, and lay with his arm
+across his forehead.
+
+High, high up, between the straggling branches of the tree, in the
+clear, blue African sky above him, he could see the vultures flying
+southward.
+
+*****
+
+That evening the men sat eating their suppers round the fires. The large
+troop had not come up; and the mules had been brought in; and they were
+to make a start early the next morning.
+
+Halket was released from his duty, and had come up, and lain down a
+little in the background of the group who gathered round their fire.
+
+The Colonial and the Englishman had given orders to all the men of their
+mess that Halket was to be left in quiet, and no questions were to be
+asked him; and the men, fearing the Colonial’s size and the Englishman’s
+nerve, left him in peace. The men laughed and chatted round the fire,
+while the big Colonial ladled out the mealies and rice into tin plates,
+and passed them round to the men. Presently he passed one to Halket,
+who lay half behind him leaning on his elbow. For a while Halket ate
+nothing, then he took a few mouthfuls; and again lay on his elbow.
+
+“You are eating nothing, Halket,” said the Englishman, cheerily, looking
+back.
+
+“I am not hungry now,” he said. After a while he took out his red
+handkerchief, and emptied carefully into it the contents of the plate;
+and tied it up into a bundle. He set it beside him on the ground, and
+again lay on his elbow.
+
+“You won’t come nearer to the fire, Halket?’ asked the Englishman.
+
+“No, thank you, the night is warm.”
+
+After a while Peter Halket took out from his belt a small hunting knife
+with a rough wooden handle. A small flat stone lay near him, and he
+passed the blade slowly up and down on it, now and then taking it up,
+and feeling the edge with his finger. After a while he put it back in
+his belt, and rose slowly, taking up his small bundle and walked away to
+the tent.
+
+“He’s had a pretty stiff day,” said the Colonial. “I expect he’s glad
+enough to turn in.”
+
+Then all the men round the fire chatted freely over his concerns. Would
+the Captain stick to his word tomorrow? Was Halket going to do it?
+Had the Captain any right to tell one man off for the work, instead
+of letting them fire a volley? One man said he would do it gladly in
+Halket’s place, if told off; why had he made such a fool of himself? So
+they chatted till nine o’clock, when the Englishman and Colonial left to
+turn in. They found Halket asleep, close to the side of the tent, with
+his face turned to the canvas. And they lay down quietly that they might
+not disturb him.
+
+At ten o’clock all the camp was asleep, excepting the two men told off
+to keep guard; who paced from one end of the camp to the other to keep
+themselves awake; or stood chatting by the large fire, which still burnt
+at one end.
+
+In the Captain’s tent a light was kept burning all night, which shone
+through the thin canvas sides, and shed light on the ground about; but,
+for the rest, the camp was dead and still.
+
+By half-past one the moon had gone down, and there was left only a blaze
+of stars in the great African sky.
+
+Then Peter Halket rose up; softly he lifted the canvas and crept out.
+On the side furthest from the camp he stood upright. On his arm was tied
+his red handkerchief with its contents. For a moment he glanced up at
+the galaxy of stars over him; then he stepped into the long grass, and
+made his way in a direction opposite to that in which the camp lay. But
+after a short while he turned, and made his way down into the river bed.
+He walked in it for a while. Then after a time he sat down upon the bank
+and took off his heavy boots and threw them into the grass at the side.
+Then softly, on tip-toe, he followed the little footpath that the men
+had trodden going down to the river for water. It led straight up to the
+Captain’s tent, and the little flat-topped tree, with its white stem,
+and its two gnarled branches spread out on either side. When he was
+within forty paces of it, he paused. Far over the other side of the
+camp the two men who were on guard stood chatting by the fire. A dead
+stillness was over the rest of the camp. The light through the walls of
+the Captain’s tent made all clear at the stem of the little tree; but
+there was no sound of movement within.
+
+For a moment Peter Halket stood motionless; then he walked up to the
+tree. The black man hung against the white stem, so closely bound to
+it that they seemed one. His hands were tied to his sides, and his head
+drooped on his breast. His eyes were closed; and his limbs, which had
+once been those of a powerful man, had fallen away, making the joints
+stand out. The wool on his head was wild and thick with neglect, and
+stood out roughly in long strands; and his skin was rough with want and
+exposure.
+
+The riems had cut a little into his ankles; and a small flow of blood
+had made the ground below his feet dark.
+
+Peter Halket looked up at him; the man seemed dead. He touched him
+softly on the arm, then shook it slightly.
+
+The man opened his eyes slowly, without raising his head; and looked at
+Peter from under his weary eyebrows. Except that they moved they might
+have been the eyes of a dead thing.
+
+Peter put up his fingers to his own lips--“Hus-h! hus-h!” he said.
+
+The man hung torpid, still looking at Peter.
+
+Quickly Peter Halket knelt down and took the knife from his belt. In an
+instant the riems that bound the feet were cut through; in another he
+had cut the riems from the waist and neck: the riems dropped to
+the ground from the arms, and the man stood free. Like a dazed dumb
+creature, he stood, with his head still down, eyeing Peter.
+
+Instantly Peter slipped the red bundle from his arm into the man’s
+passive hand.
+
+“Ari-tsemaia! Hamba! Loop! Go!” whispered Peter Halket; using a word
+from each African language he knew. But the black man still stood
+motionless, looking at him as one paralysed.
+
+“Hamba! Sucka! Go!” he whispered, motioning his hand.
+
+In an instant a gleam of intelligence shot across the face; then a wild
+transport. Without a word, without a sound, as the tiger leaps when the
+wild dogs are on it, with one long, smooth spring, as though unwounded
+and unhurt, he turned and disappeared into the grass. It closed behind
+him; but as he went the twigs and leaves cracked under his tread.
+
+The Captain threw back the door of his tent. “Who is there?” he cried.
+
+Peter Halket stood below the tree with the knife in his hand.
+
+The noise roused the whole camp: the men on guard came running; guns
+were fired: and the half-sleeping men came rushing, grasping their
+weapons. There was a sound of firing at the little tree; and the cry
+went round the camp, “The Mashonas are releasing the spy!”
+
+When the men got to the Captain’s tent, they saw that the nigger was
+gone; and Peter Halket was lying on his face at the foot of the tree;
+with his head turned towards the Captain’s door.
+
+There was a wild confusion of voices. “How many were there?” “Where have
+they gone to now?” “They’ve shot Peter Halket!”--“The Captain saw them
+do it”--“Stand ready, they may come back any time!”
+
+When the Englishman came, the other men, who knew he had been a medical
+student, made way for him. He knelt down by Peter Halket.
+
+“He’s dead,” he said, quietly.
+
+When they had turned him over, the Colonial knelt down on the other
+side, with a little hand-lamp in his hand.
+
+“What are you fellows fooling about here for?” cried the Captain. “Do
+you suppose it’s any use looking for foot marks after all this tramping!
+Go, guard the camp on all sides!”
+
+“I will send four coloured boys,” he said to the Englishman and the
+Colonial, “to dig the grave. You’d better bury him at once; there’s no
+use waiting. We start first thing in the morning.”
+
+When they were alone, the Englishman uncovered Peter Halket’s breast.
+There was one small wound just under the left bosom; and one on the
+crown of the head; which must have been made after he had fallen down.
+
+“Strange, isn’t it, what he can have been doing here?” said the
+Colonial; “a small wound, isn’t it?”
+
+“A pistol shot,” said the Englishman, closing the bosom.
+
+“A pistol--”
+
+The Englishman looked up at him with a keen light in his eye.
+
+“I told you he would not kill that nigger.--See--here--” He took up the
+knife which had fallen from Peter Halket’s grasp, and fitted it into a
+piece of the cut leather that lay on the earth.
+
+“But you don’t think--” The Colonial stared at him with wide open eyes;
+then he glanced round at the Captain’s tent.
+
+“Yes, I think that--Go and fetch his great-coat; we’ll put him in it. If
+it is no use talking while a man is alive, it is no use talking when he
+is dead!”
+
+They brought his great-coat, and they looked in the pockets to see if
+there was anything which might show where he had come from or who his
+friends were. But there was nothing in the pockets except an empty
+flask, and a leathern purse with two shillings in, and a little
+hand-made two-pointed cap.
+
+So they wrapped Peter Halket up in his great-coat, and put the little
+cap on his head.
+
+And, one hour after Peter Halket had stood outside the tent looking up,
+he was lying under the little tree, with the red sand trodden down over
+him, in which a black man and a white man’s blood were mingled.
+
+All the rest of the night the men sat up round the fires, discussing
+what had happened, dreading an attack.
+
+But the Englishman and the Colonial went to their tent, to lie down.
+
+“Do you think they will make any inquiries?” asked the Colonial.
+
+“Why should they? His time will be up tomorrow.”
+
+“Are you going to say anything?”
+
+“What is the use?”
+
+They lay in the dark for an hour, and heard the men chatting outside.
+
+“Do you believe in a God?” said the Englishman, suddenly.
+
+The Colonial started: “Of course I do!”
+
+“I used to,” said the Englishman; “I do not believe in your God; but I
+believed in something greater than I could understand, which moved in
+this earth, as your soul moves in your body. And I thought this worked
+in such wise, that the law of cause and effect, which holds in the
+physical world, held also in the moral: so, that the thing we call
+justice, ruled. I do not believe it any more. There is no God in
+Mashonaland.”
+
+“Oh, don’t say that!” cried the Colonial, much distressed. “Are you
+going off your head, like poor Halket?”
+
+“No; but there is no God,” said the Englishman. He turned round on his
+shoulder, and said no more: and afterwards the Colonial went to sleep.
+
+Before dawn the next morning the men had packed up the goods, and
+started.
+
+By five o’clock the carts had filed away; the men rode or walked before
+and behind them; and the space where the camp had been was an empty
+circle; save for a few broken bottles and empty tins, and the stones
+about which the fires had been made, round which warm ashes yet lay.
+
+Only under the little stunted tree, the Colonial and the Englishman were
+piling up stones. Their horses stood saddled close by.
+
+Presently the large trooper came riding back. He had been sent by the
+Captain to ask what they were fooling behind for, and to tell them to
+come on.
+
+The men mounted their horses to follow him; but the Englishman turned
+in his saddle and looked back. The morning sun was lighting up the
+straggling branches of the tall trees that had overshadowed the
+camp; and fell on the little stunted tree, with its white stem and
+outstretched arms; and on the stones beneath it.
+
+“It’s all that night on the kopje!” said the Colonial, sadly.
+
+But the Englishman looked back. “I hardly know,” he said, “whether it is
+not better for him now, than for us.”
+
+Then they rode on after the troop.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, by
+Olive Schreiner
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