Cinderella in the South; South African tales

Front matter

3tlrata, Ww Unrfe

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

Prologue

The Thing that hath been - i

New Light on an Old Champion ii

Eighty-eight in Lavender - 10 1

Divination - - no

Le Roi est Mort - - 239

Our Lady of the Lake - 267 Epilogue ... 275

PROLOGUE

[Africa and her Sisters.]

OOME fifteen years now I have been her guest,

For all this land's hers, tho' she does not reign. She's but a ward, at what late age she'll gain Her freedom and her kingdom, it were best To risk no surmise rash. E'en now she's drest Sometimes in skins. Give her ground-nuts and grain, Cattle and thatch'd hut, then she'll not complain. She's happier-hearted than her Sisters blest.

Her Sisters blest 1 Of them what shall I say ? I like them better when they keep away. And toil in their own lands, not loll in hers. They use her ill. She's not so old as they. She drudges for them. But her youth confers A charm on her they've lost these many years.

TUT HAT'S the good of him? ' said the bar-tender VV to me. ' If he could tell us how the Ruins came he might be worth a forty-pound cheque every •month, or at least a twenty one. But he can't.*

We were discussing the new appointment of a Government Curator at the Mabgwe Ruins. I approved it, the bar-tender did not. I pleaded that he was a bit exacting, that the Curator had a very cold scent to puzzle out, and that he had tried — plodding about from ruins to ruins, moling and sapping and mining, not to speak of writing to the Rhodesian Press. Afterwards I shouldered my knapsack, sought I counsel with my carriers as to ways and means, crossed thte river and took the Ruins road. A motor-car hurtled past me when I was within two miles. Its driver had been jpointed out to me as a Jo'burg magnalie ; his passengers I did not know, but I was soon to know them. I was the first to reach the Ruins after all; for their arrival time being one o'clock, and their halting-place a hotel. Civilization demanded that they .should lunch there. ,

I drank from the fair water by the temple's western approach, and sat down to smoke under a tree in the precincts. The big cone of the main tower was just in sight. I had seen the walls before, and was in no analytical mood; S3mthesis was enough for me. I took in with my delighted eyes a roofless dome worthy to be a temple of some sort, even if it were not, a blue roof that bettered mere human aspiration, ■debris testifying to earthly incompleteness, a broken column with its memento mori — all these were simmering in my vision and my judgment. I half dozed until the voices of the lunchers began to interest me. They were doing the rounds rather hastily, lunch having cut into their time, so short at its very best.

A Church dignitary from our own territory was with them. He introduced himself to me, and he also introduced an engineer. He was a patriotic Rhodesian, that dignitary, and denounced Mclver, who had dared to assign to the Ruins a native origin.

' Such nonsense ! ' he said. ' Believe me, my dear sir, I know the natives, and I know the natives never built these walls. Poor creatures; they want firm handling, don't they? They're always in want of bossing-up. But as for this display of art, they haven't it in them, and they never had.'

The engineer did not seem interested in what was said, or in what I answered. He was a man of few words. He went off to the eastern wall, whither we followed him. I found him poking about there with a stick. The Jo 'burg charioteer was soon fus§ing along, hurrying on tea-time. ' He didn't want to get a dose of fever this trip,' he said. He had heard about our unhealthy season up north, and the month was now April. He wanted to be back by sunset. So it came to pass that his party went off to tea with but side-glances at the hill-fastness.

' I'm neither a baboon nor a nigger,' said their host, when I proposed that he should go up. After all, it was good-natured of him to motor the dignitary out, I considered. He himself affected no sort of interest in antiquities, and the dignified antiquarian under his care was so wearily keen. I went to tea with theni, postponing my reveries to camping time and night. It was not until we were eating giiavas at the end of our meal that the engineei- ■camein. Then the Jo'buJrger told him to hurry up, and went off to cherish his car. As to the enginedr, Ms scanty tea-time was not left in peace. The dignitary lectured him on the true and patriotic theory of Ophir, on Asta;rte's worship, and Solomon's gold. He answered very little, but |he hinted that there were difficulties. His lecturer glowed', and appealecl ■ to the Curator, who had just come in, bent and shaken with fever. Unhappily, yet happily for me. Tie trod on one of the curator's archaeological corns and involved himself in an apology. Before he was out of the wood I had asked the engineer a question or two.

'No time to talk now,' lie said, ' lioo much cackle. Come and see me in the town. Or, if I miss you there, I may see you on the road, mayn't I ? I'm due out your way in three days.'

Soon after he was petroled away. I went to camp in a clearing-, to sup, to smoke, to read my guideboqk. At last the night aged, and the moon rose. My carriers slept. I looked up in the night's starred face and beheld ' Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance ' there. But would I ever live to trace them by ' the magic hand of chance,' as Keats called the grace of God? I began again to mumble the lines of my guide-book, and found them rather bare and dry. I looked up at the vast tapering walls. Why was there no script there ? After all, that trenchant argument outweighed a many arguments; it scaled up like Brennus's sword, and made for a clear issue. I looked at the sleeping carriers. Did they hold the secret, not in tradition, not in history,' but in the fleshy tables of the heart and brain and aspiration of their race ? I went to sleep and dreamed of men building, building, building. They were budding stone kraals for their sacred trusts of kine, chipping and carving away at their totem hawks and their crocodiles, breaking limbs and necks over a sky-high tower, with stones for their bricks, and no slime to make them mortar. How they sang over their work, and how it grew ! Talk of Troy's walls; if only Kaffirs would start building a Troy, or a Palace of Art, or a Spiritual City, how the work would go forward to the music of them! I could hear all the parts in their melodies — the checking and countering and refrains and responses of them. But, before I woke, the parts were merged in full chorus. With th^at unison music in my ears I rose and knelt and rose again hastily. Then I ran round to the eastern wall under the zig-zag patterns. I came only just in time to see the sunrise by so doing.

It was three days after that I caught up Spenser, the Government engineer.

' I have seen buildings in North Africa,' he told me. ' They weren't much like those at Mabgwe. In the north, if they built with stones they built with great slabs. But those granite' flakes at Mabgwe were easy for a primitive people to manage. — a very primitive people. Very primitive, or why did they build on sand when, six inches deeper, they might have founded on bed-rock? They didn't understand arches, seemingly. They weren't very careful about bond in building, were they? Nor were they very careful to break joint outside, much less inside, so far as I can judge. And the script; where is it? And thie graves; where are they? If they were Semites, why didn't they write? If they were Semites, why didn't they bury? . . . But it isn't as easy as it looks, the riddle. There are one or two jagged ends — ^that conical tower, for instance.'

We camped that evening near a Mission. I admired the oblong iron-rqofed church' there. It - wasn't my style of art, but it seemed to me fair of its kind.

' Quite good,' growled my expert friend, and he said no more at the time. He spoke more freely over a last pipe.

'I'm sorry,' he said, 'not to take more interest in this sort of thing. Only, after all, it's Africanbuilt, and Europeans could do the thing a bit better, couldn't they? This sort of thing seems rather a wrong line of advance. If I hadn't seen Mabgwe so lately I mightn't mind so much.'

They showed us to a hut, a very dean one. 'That's better; that's ever so much better,' he said. 'On the wall was a rude frieze in Bushman painting styl6, but white, not red. I enlightened him as to tsenza work, as to how you could use the cool watery roots like crayons.

' Why, that's surely Jezebel looking out of that grain-bin,' he hazarded. 'But what are those?'

' The dogs to eat her.' I answered.

They were horrid little whelps with human heads. I tdld him about certain night-fears common among natives. 'It was a solid Christian who dared to paint these,' I surmised.

' If you could only get Africans to believe what Christians believed in the thirteenth century you might see signs and wonders yet,' he said.

He has not been our way again since April, but I met him at the Pro-Cathedral Pageant in January. It was organized by a Pageant Master— our mutual .friend the dignitary. Therein Asia— King Solomon and Sheba's Queen — were represented. Africa was relegated to her proper Cinderella and Plantation Chorus part. ' Poor creatures ! ' Spenser said, with a grimace, and winked at me.

'Come, and I will show you a thing,' he said to me afterwards ; ' a thing I chanced on in the Christmas holidays. It's ten miles out. I want to' inspan at six sharp to-morrow.'

I was guilty of three omissions next day. I cut a clerical meeting; I flouted the True Romance in the shape of the Pageant's second performance; I also missed the bazaar of St. Uriel's Native Church that was held on the Pageant ground. St. Uriel's structure had been put out to European contract; it was a very- didactic building, so the Pageant- Master told us. We passed it on our way out to the kopje country.

' About as sensuously lovely as a Pills' advertisement,' was Spenser's comment. 'A good pity and terror purge.' • ,

I sighed indulgently.

' It's very popular, I've heard, among the town boys. It's so very, European to native eyes, so extra corrugated and angular.'

We came up at last to that which we sought — a huge ellipse and dome of stones and earth, rising and broadening under our very eyes. It was on a farm among the granite hills, many miles from Rosebery. ' It's only a glorified stone cattle-byre, and an intensified stone Kaffir hut,' Spenser com^ mented. ' It's not even built the old Mabgwe way. These are only blocks of granite; a few of them broken, but not one of them dressed. And there's lots of mud to eke^hem out.'

' Yet there's hope in the thing. It's not an artistic dead-end like Saint Uriel's.' I pleaded.

One or two Europeans, very unskilled ones I could see, had planned this bit of work, and taken part in it. They had made themselves at charges for it, though African gifts had not been wanting. They had, so to speak, coaxed their African pack on to try an old scent. Now the moving European spirit was gone home for months to England. Before he went the former rains had ruined some of the work. He had been too ambitious, too scornful of delay. Forewarned by Africans, he had pressed to a midsummer disaster. Now he had left Africans in charge. He had trusted them to go on. One Christian, in particular, he had trusted — his fellow and his master in building. The boy had built at a colonial's cattle-kraal once. His skill had multiplied as he built on at the great church, and now he was a master craftsman. Doggedly he was building up again the rain-ruined bastions. The work was going with a swing, if a slow one. The scent was no longer a cold one. Thte pack were belling and! chiming over it, and they were running with their huntsman out of sight.

' I don't understand this bit of work properly,' Spenser said. 'What's made the dry bones live ? '

' Inspiration,' I said reverently. ' Looked at in one way it's Art. Looked at all ways it's Religion. It's the same sort of thing as went on, I suppose, when the faith of sun and moon was a power. Now the faith of Christ is gathering force in the land. The land isn't an Italy, and our twentieth century isn't that old thirteenth century; yet look out for the signs and wonders you spoke of. Likely enough they're to be expected.'

We went to the Pageant Master's lecture on the" Mabgwe Ruins that night, when we had driven back to Rosebery. It was more interesting to me as a subjective study than an objective display of learning

' Poor creatures ! ' the lecttu-er said of the natives. ' Don't put them in a false light. Whatever claims they may have to equable treatment, they have no •claim to be considered romantic. The ancient romance of this country is the romance of a nobler race^ — ^the romance of the Tyrian trader, Tyrian or Sabaean. Allow me but a trifling emendation, and Matthew Arnold's lines will serve to indicate that romance.' Substituting ' Zambesians ' for ' Iberians,' he gave us the last lines of ' The Scholar Gipsy.' ' In that era of Tyre's trade,' he concluded, ' I place the golden age of our country-^a golden age which under our own Imperial rule begins anew.'

' H'm,' said Spenser. 'That live Mashona building-boy's worth many dead Phoenicians — ^to me, at any rate. As to defining romance, we'd better agree to differ. " Do well unto thyself, and ^11 men will speak well of thee," ' he went on, with a tang of bitterness. 'Jew-boys and Arabs mopped up trade when they were living, now th'ey jump other men's kudos, being dead.'

' Never mind,' I said. ' Art for Art's sake, aspiration for aspiration's, faith for faith's! "And some lo Cinderella in the South

there be which have no memorial; who are perished as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them." '

'Never mind,' it was his turn to say. "That granite kopje church is rising, and Magbwe Ruins stand — the quick and the dead. These shall both come up for judgment and get justice. Yes, if they have to wait for it till the Supreme Court of All holds session.'

WE were going on an expedition long before the morning, light came. Our ship was an armed steamer — a cqnverted cargo boat. We had reinforced our naval guns' crews and our Indian ship's guard by taking officers and native, soldiers (askaiis) aboard at a certain bay. We had reinforced our artillery by borrowing a Maxim from the shore. I had a guest on board that night-^a cheerful padre. How he seemed to relish his craft, and how able I ' esteemed him. I was very raw at the work, and be helped me to understand what my , defects were both in nature and grace. He had the sort of smile, I thought — the real, right sort — to warm a naval parishioner's heart. He was very keen on the new sort of thrills and experiences that he had sought for himself by coming aboard.

We reclined on camp beds high up on the bridgedeck, but we did not drop asleep when the electric light failed and faded. We asked each other's ages, and discussed parts of England as we had known them in more peaceful days ; then we assured one another that we wanted to rise early. We were to steam off on our sudden raid in the dark. Coffee had been ordered about 5.30; action might be expected to begin not much later than 6 a.m. We speculated as to whether it were true that our ship would have to face an old field gun's fire on the morrow, as well as a Maxim's. I was eloquent as I told how our four-inch gun might be expected to shake the ship. After that, in the dimness we talked shop; we had neither of us possibly had many easy openings fot that ravishing employment lately.

Was it right to pray for our own side's success? I was steadfast in my scruples- as to praying thus, my new-found friend was inclined to be a little scornful of them. ' Is there a God of the Germans fighting the English tribal God ? ' I asked rather irreverently, and my friend showed that he was shocked. I apologized. ' Let's leave the Supreme Power out,' I said. ' Let's consider the action of the saints in this war. Are they supposed to be scrapping like the gods in Homer — English Saint George against German Saint Michael — and so on?' But my friend did not seem very keen about either Homer or hagiology. He explained that he was a C.M.S. man, and not a mediasvalist. The discussion languished, ere he murmured ' Good night.'

I slept rather fitfully. I was awake long before the ship moved away on her fierce errand. At last, when she had been steaming some while, I stole down in the dark to the bathroom. When I came out of it the grey twilight was beginning. I crepiE aft and looked over the bulwark, wondering how far we were away now. The shore Maxim was in place there with plenty of sand bags about it, but the officer in charge of it was still stretched abed. His friend the Intelligence Officer, who had messed with us last night, was snoring on another bed beside him. I stood looking at a dusky island in the moonlight, and began praying a favourite prayer of mine for those times, asking God to let Saint Michael coyer our heads in the day of battle. I muttered the prayer very low, buH it appeared that somebody beard. A slim figure, seemingly in khaki, that I had not noticed, rose up from a seat on the sand bags.

' Are you praying something about battles ? ' it asked. I started, and assented clumsily.

' How does one pra,y about battles nowadays ? ' the investigator proceeded. He spoke in the friendliest way, and managed to set even me at ease. So I told him what I had prayed for.

' It sounds a fair sort of prayer ; better than some I've heard,' he allowed, as he sat down again. ' Some people seem to forget' the last lot of the Books in the Bible when they pray nowadays.' I heartily agreed.'

' I don't believe for one,' he went on, ' that Sain? Michael is passionately interested in wiping out either English or askaris or Germans. It's surely better to pray about him like you prayed. I should think the negative work appeals to him more than, the positive, the salvage more than the blotting.'

His voice was clear, and evidently carried. The Maxim's warden grumbled,, and began to sit up in bed.

' Possibly,' this disturber of slumber went on quite unconcernedly, ' Saint Michael has a clearer notion as to the real enemy than some clients who invoke "him.'

Then' the officer in pyjamas accosted me, and the thread of the other's talk was lost. When I moved off to dress he had already left his perch among the sand bags. I climbed the ladder, and had my coffee. Soon after came the scurry to stations. We were •coming into the bay in the glory of that morning under hangings of amber and rose and feathery grey. The four-inch gun's crew were in their places. 1 stood trying to read the Prayer before Action in its very small print. I murmured what I was doing to my cheery colleague, so much more enthusiastic than I was about what seemed to be coming. Then someone came up and spoke to me. It was surely my friend from the sand bags. I could see him properly now. He was surely an officer. He stood tip slender and shapely in his khaki, but he was not wearing a single star or a regimental badge of any kind. Had he forgotten these in the hurry of this eager morning? With but a few words, he passed on towards the guns' crews. Soon our four-inch gun was shaking the ship horribly., We were shelling a trench that ran up a hillside, they said. I sat under cover of the bulwark near some kneeling riflemen, far from enjoying myself. Yet no gun roared back in answer to our own. It seemed to be one-sided enough, this operation of war.

' It's a fearful weapon,' remarked my colleague rather complacently, as he paced towards the gun platform. One prayed for those who wdll"e naked to its fearsomeness up on the hill there, and prayed about Saint Michael's intervention to Saint Michael's Commander-in-Chief. The long-drawn moments slurred by us. A bell rang as the ship wound her way in slowly. The mournful cry of him who took the soundings came again and again. Then we stopped dead anew, and our gun's mouth roared and flamed.

'Such a crowd of askaris; the hill's black with them! ' So the signalman cried to the doctor, as he sped by on a message. I was interested in watching the gun-layer as he readjusted the dragonmouth. But what had my friend of the sand-bags to do with the matter ? He moved among the gun's •crew, and none said him nay; his hands were on the gun after the accredited gunlaiyer's. We shelled another position, and then another. Afterwards came a lull, and some of us hurried up to breakfast.

There was much talk there of the possible or probable slaughter we had effected. Doubtless the store ship that had followed us and hung behind us had served us well. Those on shore had surely been more disposed to hold to their positions, fearing that she carried troops, and meant to land them. Now she was steaming slcKwly away. How many did our bag amount to ? The Intelligence Officer was sanguine, so was my colleague, but the gunneryofficer was rather pessimistic. ' Two or three of those rounds went just wrong,' he grunted. ' We've struck a bad day.' After that the porridge and the bacon and the eggs were done with; we were soon back at our stations. Once more our gun bombarded. Once more no answer came. Now occurred the cruise of the motor boat; the best adventure of the day so far, as it seemed to me.

The boat was lowered, and the shore Maxim mounted in it. Sand bags were piled up in plenty. A Naval Reserve officer, fair-haired and youngfaced, sprang in to join the gun's officer. There was also a British bluejacket ready to go, and there were African soldiers and sailors, as well as the two engine-men, English and Goanese. They were to beat up the river, and hunt down canoes, should any appear.

My. heart thrilled as I uttered God-speed to the Maxim warden. I think he was unmarried, but his fellow officer was both husband and father; they might have a fiery time in front. Last my graceful friend, with no stars or badges on his khaki, slipped into the boat. He seemed to come and go as he liked, and none refused his services. The boat hummed away from us, past some rocks, and rotmd a headland into the unseen. Then our ship travelled on slowly, before she stopped and fired again. She shot away many rounds that time. I was sick and weary of the firing as I sat on the deck by the doctor's cabin. My colleague was much more alert and cheerful. He had secured a shell-case by the naval commander's bounty. ' They make such splendid trophies,' he told me. But I did not covet one much. I thought of how such war trophies were in demand for Christmas decoration vases in a church by the lakeside. I also thought of the quite possible horror and havoc of shattered askaris' bodies that those splendid trophies might be supposed to have wrought. How one thought besides of the adventurers in that whizzing motor-boat during that next half-hour. But as it turned out, according to their disappointed report, not a shot was fired at them.

' We let fly with the Maxim at some natives and one European on shore,' the gun-worker shouted, as they drew up at the ship's side. ' We saw some canoes, three of them. Askaris were in them, and urging the paddlers on. Then, of >all times, the Maxim took it into its head to jam badly. So we didn't get them.' I happened to catch my friend in khaki's eye as the other lamented. He looked quite cheerful about things, while the other went on, ' We'd have sunk the lot, if it hadn't jammed just then.'

The thought flickered into my mind as to whether anybody was responsible for that singular coincidence. I looked in my friend's face with some sort of an uneasy question. But he only smiled. His face was strangely prepossessing, so entirely fearless, yet not the least truculent. His brown eyes and boy^s lips answered my question with the most

C engaging of smiles. Those brown eyes assorted piquantly with his very fair hair. He had pushed his white helmet far back on his yellow head. Half an hour later we were in our action stations once more. Our riflemen were firing at individual askaris (were they all askaris, and not unhappy villagers ?) who could be descried upon the shore. The signalman, passing by again, snatched a rifle and fired just beside me. Ope of the Maxims meanwhile was working away grimly, the officer's face was set firm as he steadied bis coughing machine. Then it was that I saw my unattached friend step towards him, and take up his stand behind him. Ping! A bullet came just over the gun-director's head. ' That was a near shave,' the warrant officer told me afterwards. ' Someone aimed too high, or he'd have got him that worked the gun.'

Yet it was a mystery to me why the bullet did iiot get that handsome head behind and above him, the head that I reflected had doubtless helped to draw the fire so high. He who had exposed himself came to me untouched. ' It looked near,' he allowed to me smiling. He stayed by us for the rest of that fell morning. He smiled, and bade me cheer up, when the naval commander went by; had he not twitted me for sitting safe under the bulwark and wincing when the four-inch gun roared ? He smiled also a little ironically when my colleague came up, still fondling his trophy and dilating on its splendour. Then he smiled again and again as he moved behind him to and fro on the deck, watching him in the pitiless firing. He smiled moreover when he moved up to the gun; he was revising the gunlayer's work now and then, so far as I could make out his movements. He smiled afterwards when the Intelligence Officer made such sanguine estimate's of the slaughter we had d^ealt out to forts and trenches. They were talking together, he and his comrade of the Maxim gun, discussing whether the bag was really a big one, the former as glib with th^ pros as the latter was with the cons. The tall listener smiled rather wistfully as he heard them. After the last round from the six-pounder had been fired, before we went to lunch, he came up and said farewell to me. ' But I shall see you again on board, shan't I ? ' I asked. ' We shan't put you off at the Bay till nearly sunset, shall we?' 'I may be getting off long before then,' he said, but he did not explain how. M^ prayer book had fallen on the deck, and he picked it up and gave it to me, ' Mind you keep to your own line,' he said. , 'I like that prayer in your prayer book about Saint Michael. Doubtless he's covered not a few people's heads in this day" of battle, not all of them on the one side. It's likely enough he has unearthly notions about war, as he's an unearthly being. Perhaps the dragon he makes war on, war to the death, is neither England nor Germany, but just the scrapping between them.'