The worldlings

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Class ^ >3

Copyright N° 2-

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

Chapter I

The thermometer registered ioo° in the shade, and where he stood there was no shade; on the depositing floors no relief from the intense, dry heat was possible for even a moment. He was paid to watch twelve Kaffirs and Zulus, who broke the lumps of diamondiferous soil into smaller pieces, and were adroit in concealing the gems ; their skins glistened now, and they swung their picks torpidly. He was paid to watch them from “sun up” until “sun down,” and God knows there was little else for him to view. No tree, no shrub rose here; there was nothing but the arid earth and the blue flare of sky. In his eyes was the dazzle of the grey ground which stretched before him like a level beach, and reflected the blaze of the sun; in his ears was the long-drawn whir of the tubs as they traveled the wire runners to the mine; in his heart was despair.

For six months he had lived this loathsome life — he was remembering it. During six months he

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had filled a fool’s berth because energy and brains and education were able to find no better opening. In ’82, the time when men without capital or credit could arrive on the Diamond Fields and expect to make money honestly, had already passed. He would soon be forty, and since he was seventeen the man had done his best. He had done the best that in him lay! he could maintain that. He had never neglected an opportunity, he had never committed a dishonourable action, he had never shirked hard work — but he was a failure. To go to Kimberley had been his purpose for years, while he buffeted ill-luck in America; but it had been years before he could save the means to do so. In the States, as in Australia, his struggle towards fortune had ended in a cul-de-sac; Kimberley was still called the New Rush, and the thought of it had sustained his courage. He had hoarded and scraped, and fulfilled his purpose at last. And he had come for this!

He had pictured himself a digger, labouring with his own hands on his own claim, sweating, but hopeful. He found the mines apportioned among companies — in which men like himself could secure no closer interest than they could obtain in a coalpit at home. He found that to the majority Kimberley was less like a mining camp than a share market — which concerned him as little as the Stock

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Exchange in New York, when he had trodden the Wall Street sidewalk. He found that he had added another unit to the hundreds of Englishmen seeking a living wage, and had finally welcomed a situation that held no prospect of improvement.

And he would soon be forty — the better half of his life had gone! He recalled the period when forty had been so far ahead that to foresee himself a rich man by then had seemed a moderate expectation. Recalled it? It was only the other day! He had been twenty-five, with an eternity at his disposal; thirty, with a shock; thirty-five, and fighting against time. The flash of three sign-posts, and his youth was dead! Each succeeding year had been a clod on its coffin.

“Macho !” he said to the blacks. It meant “Make haste;” it was nearly all the native vocabulary that he required.

He was asking himself “How long?” What unimaginable turn of the wheel would liberate him? Money was not made by working for other people unless one worked in a prominent position. The manager of the company had a thousand a year, though he could scarcely be thirty, and it was well known had never set eyes on a washing-machine, or a rough stone, until a few months before he strolled into the post. He wore a blue-and-white puggaree round his wide-awake, and a cummer-

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bund in lieu of a belt, and flicked *his new Bedford cords with an unnecessary hunting crop; and he looked at the hauling-engine as if he feared it was going to explode. Yet he had a thousand a year; and he would buy scrip, and prosper, and go to England by-and-by to live in ease. But that had been influence — his brother had been manager before him, and had initiated him into the duties. The dealers who sat in their shirt-sleeves, sorting diamonds on white paper in the windows of their iron offices, would retire, and go to England by-and-by; but to be a dealer required capital and knowledge of the trade. The brokers who bustled in and out of the offices, netting commissions on their sales, might nurse hopes of England and distant independence; but to be a broker required a license and a heavy guarantee.

England! In two-and-twenty years his only glimpse of it had been in the few days passed in London the previous spring, after he had landed from America preparatively to sailing for the Cape. The longing for it thrilled him. As he watched the Kaffirs, and sweltered in the sun, he fancied what it would be like to be on the river in flannels lazying under the boughs; to be driving in a hansom among the lights of the West End; to taste the life of the kid-gloved men he had envied on those April evenings from the pavement, as the

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cabs sped by him bearing them to the restaurants, to the theatres, to women's arms.

“Macho!" he repeated perfunctorily. Then noticing that some of the gang seemed half asleep: “Hi!" he cried, “what are you doing? That isn’t work, it’s rest!’’

At his tone their movements quickened, though his words were unintelligible to them, but after a few prods with their picks they grew comatose again. One of the squad, who called himself “Me Tom,’’ had been a kitchen boy, and could speak English.

“Tell them," said Maurice Blake to him, “that if they’re lazy they won’t get full pay on Saturday; do you hear?"

Me Tom nodded, and translated the warning; and the offenders answered all together at great length.

“What do they say?" asked the overseer.

“They say," replied the native, “that the baas is a just baas; what he says is sense. They say they thank him that he not use the sjambok to them, or be cruel with his feet, or throw stones. He is a very good baas."

“Stop that rot,” said Blake; “I don’t want to hear any lies!"

The negro raised an arm solemnly, with the first and second fingers extended, and said:

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“Kors!” which signified “So help me God!” He continued: “They say it is not because they lazy that they not work, baas; but because on Saturday they start away, with their savings, and their blankets, and their guns, as the baas must have often seen others start. They say they go back to their own country, and they buy wives; and they will have daughters, and much cattle — and they so sick with happiness that they cannot work, baas. Kors!”

“I understand,” said Blake, slowly; he understood very well. “Tell them they must do their best.”

So he was popular with the Kaffirs; he had not guessed it, nor thought about the matter.

“Ask them,” he said now, “what they call me.”

No white man on the floors was known to the niggers by his name — it was sufficient that an overseer should be a “baas,” and a manager a “big baas.” But among the blacks themselves their masters were always referred to by nicknames, and though, if these transpired, they seldom sounded very apt to European ears, proof was often afforded that to the native mind they were extraordinarily descriptive. When a party of Kaffirs tramped homeward, after the fields had served their purpose, they met on the road other parties, bound in their turn for the mines; and then they io

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who returned narrated to their compatriots “the dangers they had passed,” and uttered counsel, cautioning them against the manager who had flogged their brother to death, and commending the overseer under whom they had been able to steal “klips.” And so serviceable were the nicknames that, when the newcomers arrived, they identified the owners at sight, and recognized the baas who was desirable and the baas who should be shunned.

“Well, don’t be afraid,” exclaimed Blake, seeing that the interpreter looked bashful; “I want to know.”

“They say,” said Me Tom, as if disclaiming all agreement with the sobriquet himself, “that they call the baas ‘The baas with the square shoulders / ' who is hungry in the eyes.”

“Thanks,” said Blake. “Now you can get on; and put your back into it!”

The burning glare of the day was gradually abating, the sun streamed across the sorting-shed now, turning the corrugated iron of the roof to fire. A breeze arose, hot as the breath of an oven, catching the dried tailings and blowing them across the floors in clouds that grew momentarily denser. As it increased in force, the grit was volleyed in blinding gusts, hissing as it swept near, and stinging the neck and hands. The ii

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atmosphere was darkened as if by fog; the doors of adjacent sheds slammed violently; and the neighing of the horses could be distinctly heard. But after half-an-hour the dust-storm passed.

Slowly, slowly, the sun dropped lower behind the sorting-shed; the grey of the diamondiferous ground lost its tinge of blue; and the screams of the engines announced that the day was done. Blake picked up his jacket, and trudged down the barren road that wound to Market Square and what served him for a home. His berth was in Bultfontein, and diggers and blacks still poured from the neighboring mine of Du Toit’s Pan when he reached it. As he passed the veranda of the one-storied irorw club he could hear the popping of corks and the voices of men luckier than he in some approach to comfort; outside the canteens and the tin shanties made of the lining of packing cases, the guttural cries of the niggers filled the air. Natives stood in groups everywhere, some with their blankets on, others still as they had left the works, shouting and gesticulating excitedly. An ox wagon lumbered through the deep dust of Main Street; on the stoep of the Carnarvon Hotel the proprietor and one of the visitors were fighting. After he had drunk a limejuice-and-soda Blake walked along Du Toit’s Pan Road till he came to his bedroom door; he unlocked it, and

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crossed the mud floor wearily. The heat had melted the candle till it drooped from the candlestick in a half-hoop, and stuck to the washhand stand; when he had straightened it, he washed. The washhand stand and a truckle bed furnished the room between the corrugated iron walls, so he lay on the bed and listened to the buzz of a hundred flies, until the clashing of a handbell summoned him to dinner.

The boarders belonged to the lower ranks; most of them had overseers’ places like his own. A woman was rarely seen at a Diamond Fields hotel, but temporarily there were two women here. They were the wife and daughter of a Cockney who had kept a Kaffir store which had recently been destroyed by fire. The charge of arson had not been proved, and the family were returning to Southwark with the insurance money. The finger nails of the assembly testified to a laborious week, and Maurice, who knew none of them, hated them with an unreasoning rage. . He ate with his eyes fixed upon his plate, about which the flies swarmed furiously; but he could not stop his ears, and, stimulated by the unaccustomed society of white women, the men grew humorous as the beer vanished; it was for their “humour” that he cursed them. Habitude had steeled him to their adjec-

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tives, but under the sallies and the giggles of the third class his nerves were taut.

He finished his meal as hurriedly as usual, and caught up his hat. The moon had risen now, and the mounds of debris, which were all that relieved the flatness of the dreary view, gleamed like snow. He hailed a “cart,” for he felt too tired to walk into Kimberley this evening, and he must inquire how Jardine was. For the first time it occurred to him to wonder what he had done with his evenings before these visits to the house in Lennox Street became his habit. What had begun it? There had been a melee in Carme’s saloon one night, when the threat of wrecking the Kama Company’s machinery was in the air, but he didn’t quite remember how Jardine and he had come to leave the bar together. However, the row had been his introduction to the only educated man he knew, or had a chance of knowing.

Again Kimberley looked large and cheerful to him by comparison with the Pan as the cart rattled into the electric light, but the air of cheerfulness was only momentary, and after the principal thoroughfare the streets were empty and dark.

Maurice stopped the Hottentot driver at a wooden cottage with a stoep,' and rapped at the door. A voice called to him to go in, and when he obeyed he stood in the parlour.

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The construction was simple. The cottage consisted of one story, and was spacious enough to have formed a good-sized room. Two partitions, roughly covered with chintz, divided it into three, which served for sitting-room, bedroom and kitchen. At the back was a small compound, where the washing hung, enclosed by a corrugated iron fence.

A woman in a rocking chair had been reading by a paraffin lamp, and as he entered, she put out her hand.

“How is he?” asked Maurice.

“He is bad,” she said. “He's asleep now; don’t walk about — the more he can sleep the better; come and sit down. I dare say he’ll wake before you go — I shall hear him if he moves.”

“What does the doctor say?”

“If he pulls through, the doctor advises a trip to the Colony; it’s easy to give advice, isn’t it! If we can’t manage that, ‘Alexanderfontein might pick him up.’”

“They always advise men to leave the Fields after a bad attack of the fever,” he said. “I know. I had a touch of it myself soon after I got here.”

He took a seat by the table, and for a few moments neither said any more. The woman was staring at nothing, her brows meeting in a frown, and her passionate mouth compressed. The wrap- 15

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per she wore was discolored, and her carelessly coiled hair had come half unpinned; yet she was far from looking a mere handsome slut, who had sunk to her surroundings, or a woman who was used to them. She had lived, perhaps, five and thirty years; and dressed as nature had designed her to dress — as once, probably, she had dressed — she would have been magnificent.

“A month at Alexanderfontein wouldn’t cost a great deal,” said Maurice, at last; “can’t it be worked, Mrs. Jardine?”

“Do you know how broke we are?” she returned, impatiently. “Have you any idea?”

He shook his head. “I know things aren’t gay — Jardine never went into details.”

“We have about nine pounds to-night; that’s our capital! There’s no reason why I should make a secret of it. Oh, don’t look concerned — we shall rub along! But it will hardly run to a month’s hotel bill, eh?”

“No, it won’t run to a month’s hotel bill,” he said. “I didn’t understand things were so bad as that. Well, I can manage to lend him a fiver, you know — I can lend it to him now; you’d better take it for him, will you?”

“You’re down on your own luck,” she replied; “and I didn’t tell you for that. Besides, there’s — there’s just a chance of something big happening.

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No, we won’t borrow from you before we’re obliged to; you shall lend us a few pounds later on, if there’s no other way. Now, you’ll have a drink. Yes, you will!” she said, decisively. “We aren’t so hard up that we haven’t a bottle of whisky in the house — we never are! Perhaps it would have been a good thing for Phil if we had been sometimes! The girl brought in that jug of water just now — it’s quite cool.”

“Shall I mix you some?” asked Maurice, fetching the bottle and two tumblers.

“Thanks. You know you can smoke? If you sit by the window he can’t smell it in the bedroom. It’s a lively state of things, isn’t it? This is the result of turning over a new leaf. While he knocked about in cities Phil was right enough; he always fell on his feet* somehow; but he really meant to put his shoulder to the wheel when we came to this heaven-forsaken country — he thought he was going to make money with an ostrich farm. An ostrich farm!” Her gesture told everything. “I shall hate the sight of an ostrich feather to the day I die. Then he came up here — when he had lost all the dollars that would have given him a show! What fools men are!”

“A man is always called a fool if he has bad luck,” he said; “and it’s the one sort of 'folly’ that the world doesn’t make excuses for. Tut money

"X

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in thy purse’ — and keep it there, for nobody will give you anything when it has gone. Here endeth the first lesson, and the last.”

“That’s your philosophy?” she said.

“That’s my philosophy, or part of it; there’s more that I’ve acquired too late. Succeed! It’s the only duty imposed on a man. Never mind how — succeed! It’s a desirable world while it turns the sunny side to you, but a clean record won’t pawn for much when you’re on your uppers.”

“Have you ever had a good time?” inquired the woman, curiously. “Have you always had to rough it, or did you come a cropper once?”

“I never came a cropper in the sense you mean,” he said. “My father had made his money in business, and retired before I was born, and most of his fortune was dropped on the Stock Exchange in England when he was sixty. He had brothers-inlaw who wrote urging him to join them in mining operations with the few thousands that remained. The young men were flat broke at the time and pretty desperate; the figures they sent were very clever. He arranged to leave my sister behind with their mother — I was still at school — and we let him sail. I think the only advice we gave him was not to ‘suspect’ his partners — I thought I was very clever, little ass! — we warned him that he had a ‘suspicious nature.’ After they had robbed him

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and the climate and the hardships had broken his health, he escaped to the coast, and my sister went out to him. He began to get stronger; he was happy there — pathetically happy, when one re members that he was grudged even that! His remittances for her keep were missed in London

they had been very generous — and the old woman on one side and her sons on the other wrote upbraiding him for his weakness in ‘hanging back/ ‘Hanging back’ was the term used. They Were very scornful about his ‘hanging back.’ He was told that it was very cowardly to want to live in comfort with his child! They got my sister sent home, and hounded him to the mines again.”

“How old were you?”

“I was sixteen. When he had very little more to lose, his brothers-in-law told him he had better go back to England, and stay with their mother himself. He stayed with their mother, and was insulted and overcharged, until she had had his last pound and everything of value from his trunks. Then she turned him out. My sister had been brought up to look forward to a life of leisure and refinement, but she went to work — so did I; and we did the best we could for him; between us we contrived to find fifteen shillings every week for ‘partial board in a musical family in Dalston/ When I was eighteen I went abroad. My father was one

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of the best men that ever lived; he had given away large sums, and helped many people; and there wasn’t a day during his last five years on which he had enough to eat. The wretch who turned him out, and who had sponged on him from the hour he married, was the worst woman I have known — she had every vice except unchastity — and she stood high in her own esteem, and devoured delicacies to the end. I think that was when I began to see that the only moral contained by life is 'Never be poor/ ”

"And your sister? Where is she now?”

"My sister got a situation in a draper’s shop, and died in it before she was twenty-three.”

He took his pipe from his pocket, and filled it moodily; and the woman lit a cigarette over the lamp. After a whiff, she said:

"I don’t think I ever met a man who spoke well of his father before. Phil hasn’t much reason to care a great deal about his!”

"I didn’t know his father was alive,” he said, striking a match as far as possible from his nostrils.

"No, he doesn’t talk about him to anyone.” She hesitated a second in a struggle with an impulse, and then, succumbing to it, added quickly: "Look here, I’ll tell you something, though I didn’t mean to yet! Phil’s father is a very rich man.”

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“Why doesn’t he send you some money, then?” said Maurice.

“Perhaps he will— that’s what I meant when I said there was a chance of something big happening to us! But Phil left home when he was nineteen; there was I don’t know . . . Phil was

wild. It doesn’t much matter after twenty — how many? Phil is forty-two. Besides nobody heard anything about it; it was hushed up. Don’t you say anything about this to Phil !”

“I never give away a confidence,” he said. “Well?”

“Well, his passage was paid to Melbourne, and he could draw so much a month, on condition that he never went back to England — it was very little, for his father wasn’t well off in those days. After about eight years the payments stopped altogether; the old man had had losses or got tired of the game. Phil was dead sick of the country, and he’d had a fluke, so he went to the States. I met him in San Francisco. Well, a few months ago, the old man, who’s nearly eighty, came into a baronetcy. Phil’s father is Sir Noel Jardine now, with about twenty thousand a year.”

“Good Lord,” said Maurice. “Is the property entailed?”

“Yes, sir! And, anyhow, Phil was the only child he had, and there’s nobody else to succeed. I was

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bound to tell you, I couldn’t keep it in any longer! I’m waiting for the answer to a cable we sent last month; and if it comes — Scot! if it comes, we shall go to London, and I shall wear proper frocks and hats again, and lace, and furs, and diamonds, and

drive in the Park, and ” She had risen at the

thought, her dark eyes shining with excitement, and she paused with a mortified laugh: “I look like lace and diamonds to-night, don’t I?” she said, bitterly. “Where’s my drink? Have another, and wish us luck.”

“What’s the principal doubt?” he said. “Why shouldn’t an answer come? Isn’t your husband in correspondence with his father?”

“It was stipulated that there should be no correspondence when Phil was shipped off. He wrote once, about five years ago, just after we came out here; but he didn’t get any answer, and he has never written since.”

“But you say the old man hadn’t come into the property five years ago; the property will make a difference.”

“Yes, that’s why we hope; he mayn’t be so vindictive now. And our cable would have thawed stone! I say ‘ours,’ but of course Sir Noel doesn’t know anything about me. We couldn’t have many words because of the expense, but they were such

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touching words; Phil did laugh! Do you think it looks bad that we haven’t heard yet?”

“Has there been time for a reply?”

“Not by letter, no — that’s only due by this mail — but he could have cabled; he could have cabled the money, and we should have been on the sea by now, and Phil wouldn’t have caught camp fever! But then he’s mean — Phil says he was always mean — a draft would be so much cheaper; Phil didn’t expect a cable. Listen — he’s awake! Wait a moment, I’ll see if you can go in.”

She hurried into the bedroom, and through the open door Maurice could hear her say: “Well, you have been asleep! Let me turn the pillow for you.”

The other tones were indistinct.

So Jardine was the son of a baronet — the intelligence had been rather startling — and, supplying the dots and crosses, he had done something dishonest in the past? Well, so many men had! and the remembrance didn’t seem to haunt them much. “Remorse” was what the well-meaning attributed to the unscrupulous to console you for their success; an invention of the optimists to restore the balance ! And it had happened years ago, and nobody had known. If he recovered, Jardine would doubtless go home now, and lounge in the club windows and admire the prospect of twenty thou-

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sand a year. What a life was awaiting him; how incredible a change!

The sick man's thoughts were evidently flowing in the same channel, and on a sudden his voice reached the parlour thinly:

“Cable to the governor,” he was saying; “cable to the governor! Nearly eighty, and lived them all out! Twenty thousand a year — what a splash! My God! Can’t take it with him! Rosa! Where’s Rosa? Why don’t you send the cable?”

“Yes, old boy, I’m here. The cable has gone; it’s all right.”

Then for a few seconds there was a low muttering, which sank to silence.

After some minutes had passed the woman reappeared in the doorway, with her finger to her lip, and Maurice rose cautiously to meet her whisper:

“He’s going off again. He was delirious — I think I’d better stop there.”

“Good night, then,” he murmured. “I’ll come in to-morrow.”

She nodded. “Yes, come to-morrow. Good night.” She let him out as noiselessly as could be, and he stole across the stoep on tiptoe into the street.

Chapter II

At sunset the following evening rain commenced to fall, and it fell in floods. Kimberley was inaccessible; the horses of the Cape carts, making for shelter, were swept off their feet, and a boiler outside Tarry’s was washed down the sluit. Fortyeight hours had passed since his last visit, when Maurice reached the cottage in Lennox Street again; and the coloured girl, who chopped the wood and did the cooking, was leaving for home.

“Oh, Mr. Blake, sir, it’s all over — he’s gone!” she faltered, stopping.

Partially prepared though he had been to hear it, there was still the shock. He whitened a little, and strove to disguise that he was moved.

“Where’s your missis,” he said; “can I see her?”

“She’s inside,” answered the girl; and Maurice pushed past her, and entered.

The lamp had not been lighted, and for the first instant he thought the parlour was empty; then he went forward with his hand outstretched.

“What can I say?” he said. “You understand, don’t you?”

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The woman lifted her face from the sofa where she was lying, and he could see, even in the shadow, that she was disfigured with weeping.

“He died yesterday afternoon,” she said unsteadily. “How did you hear?”

“The servant just told me. I — I’m so sorry. . . If I’m not too late, you must let me do what has to be done,” he continued after a pause; “you haven’t anybody to turn to here.”

“Not here nor anywhere else!” she said, raising herself slowly. “Light the lamp, will you? I can’t see where anything is.”

He did as she wished, and sought awkwardly for some phrase of consolation. The despair in her manner perturbed him, for he had never credited her with the devotion that would explain it, and was doubtful whether he was asked to attribute it to the loss of her husband, or the loss of her expectations. Her tone when she spoke next relieved him.

“Look!” she said, pointing to an envelope on the mantelpiece. “The mail is in. I sent the girl to the post-office to-day, and his father had written! He sends a hundred pounds, and wants him back. Look!”

She thrust the envelope into his hands, and he read the contents. The note that accompanied the draft — it could not be called a letter — was a little

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formal, he thought, even in the circumstances; a little stilted — the note of an old man; but it was not unkindly couched. The heading, Croft Court, Oakenhurst, Surrey, suggested vague splendours to his mind.