The Outspan: Tales of South Africa. Fitzpatrick Percy
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who was he? Did you – ” began the man who wrote for the papers.
Barberton looked steadily at him, and with measured deliberation said:
“We never knew another word about him. From that day to this nothing has ever been heard to throw the least light on him or what he said.”
Far away in the stillness of the African night we heard the impatient half-grunt, half-groan of the lion. Near by there was a cricket chirping; and presently a couple of the logs settled down with a small crunch, and a fresh tongue of flame leaped up. Barberton pumped a straw up and down the stem of the faithful briar, and remarked sententiously:
“Yah, it’s a rum old world, this of ours! I’ve seen civilisation take its revenge that way quite a lot of times – just like a woman!”
No one else said a word. Now and then a snore came from under the waggon where the drivers were sleeping.
The dog beside me gave some abortive whimpers, and his feet twitched convulsively – no doubt he was hunting in dreamland. I felt depressed by Barberton’s yarn.
But round the camp-fire long silences do not generally follow a yarn, however often they precede one. One reminiscence suggests another, and it takes very, very little to tempt another man to recall something which “that just reminds him of.” It was the surveyor who rose to it this time; I could see the spirit move him. He sat up, stroked his clean-shaven face, closed the telescope eye, and looked at Barberton.
“Do you know,” he began thoughtfully, “you talk of chaps going away because of something happening – some quarrel or mistake or offence or something. That is all a sort of clap-trap romance, I know – the mystery trick, and so forth; but I confess it always interests me, although I know it’s all rot, because of a thing which happened within my own knowledge – an affair of a shipmate of mine, one of the best fellows that ever stepped the earth, in spite of the fact that he was a regular Admirable Crichton.
“He was an ideal sort of chap, until you got to know him really well, and found out that he was cursed with one perfectly miserable trait. He never – absolutely never– forgave an injury, affront, or cause of quarrel. He was not huffy or bad-tempered – a sunnier nature never was created; a more patient, even-tempered chap never lived – but it was really appalling with what immutable obstinacy he refused to forgive. In the instances that came under my own notice, where he had quarrelled with former friends – not through his own fault, I must say – nothing in this world, or any other, for that matter, could influence him to shake hands or renew acquaintance. His generosity and unselfishness were literally boundless, his courage and fidelity superb; but anyone who had seen evidence of his fault must have felt sorrow and regret for the blemished nature, and must have been awestruck and frightened by his relentlessness. Death all round him, the sight of it in friends, the prospect of it for himself, never shook his cursed obstinacy; as we knew, after one piece of business. He got the V.C. for a remarkable – in fact, mad – act of courage in rescuing a brother officer. The man he carried out, fought for, fought over, and nearly died for, was a man to whom he had not spoken for some years. God knows what the difference was about. This was their first meeting since quitting the same ship, and when he carried his former friend out and laid him safely in the surgeon’s corner of the square, the half-dead man caught his sleeve, and called out, ‘God bless you, old boy!’ All he did was to loosen the other’s grip gently, and, without a word or look at him, walk back into the fight. It seems incredible – it did to us; but he wouldn’t know him again. He had literally wiped him out of his life!
“This trait was his curse. He was well off and well connected, and he married one of the most charming women I have ever met. For years none of us knew he was married. His wife was, I am convinced, as good as gold; but she was young, attractive, accomplished, and, in fact, a born conqueror. Perhaps she was foolish to show all the happiness she felt in being liked and admired. You know the long absences of a sailor. Well, perhaps she would have been wiser had she cut society altogether; but she was a true, good woman, for all that, and she worshipped him like a god! None of us ever knew what happened; but he left wife and child, settled on them all he had in the world, handed over his estates and almost all his income, and his right to legacies to come, went out into the world, and simply erased them from his mind and life.
“That was a good many years ago – ten, I should think; and – I hate to think it – but I wish I was as sure of to-morrow as I am sure that he never recognised their existence again.”
The surveyor shuddered at the thought.
“He was a man who could do anything that other men could do. He was best at everything. He was loved by his mates, worshipped by his men, and liked and admired by everyone who met him – until this trait was revealed. Others must have felt as I did. When I discovered that in him, I don’t know whether I was more frightened or grieved. I don’t know that I didn’t stick to him more than ever – perhaps from pity, and the sense that he was his own enemy and needed help. I have never heard of or from him since he left the service, and yet I believe I was his most intimate friend. Oliver Raymond Rivers was his name. Musical name, isn’t it?”
Barberton dropped his pipe.
“Good God! Sebougwaan!”
Chapter Two.
Soltké.
An Incident of the Delagoa Road
We were transport-riders trekking with loads from Delagoa Bay to Lydenburg, trekking slowly through the hot, bushy, low veld, doing our fifteen to twenty miles a day. The roads were good and the rates were high, and we were happy.
Towards sundown two of us strolled on ahead, taking the guns in hopes of picking up a guinea-fowl, or a stembuck, or some other small game, leaving the waggons to follow as soon as the cattle were inspanned. We shot nothing; in fact, we saw nothing to shoot. It was swelteringly hot, as it always is there until the red sun goes down and all things get a chance to cool. It was also very dusty – two or three inches of powdery dust under our feet, which whipped up in little swirls at the least breath of air. I was keeping an eye on the scrub on my side for the chance of a bush pheasant, and not taking much notice of the road, when my companion pulled up with a half-suppressed exclamation, and stood staring hard at something on ahead.
“Dern my skin!” said he slowly and softly, as I came up to him. He was a slow-spoken Yankee. “Say, look there! Don’t it beat hell?”
In the direction indicated, partly hidden by the scant foliage of a thorn-tree, a man was sitting on a yellow portmanteau reading a book. The sight was unusual, and it brought the unemotional Yankee to a standstill and set us both smiling. The man was dressed in a sort of clerk’s everyday get-up, even to the bowler hat, and as he sat there he held overhead an old black silk umbrella to protect him from such of the sun’s rays as penetrated the thorn-bush. He must have become conscious of the presence of life by the subtle instinct which we all know and can’t explain, for almost immediately he raised his glance and looked us straight in the eyes. He rose and came towards us, laying aside the umbrella, but keeping his place in the book.
The scene was too ludicrous not to provoke a smile, and the young fellow – he could not have been above twenty-three – mistaking its import, raised his hat politely and wished us “good-afternoon.”
He spoke English, but with a strong German accent, and his dress, his open manner, his ready smiles, and, above all, his politeness, proclaimed him very much a stranger to those parts. Key murmured a line from a compatriot: “Green peas has come to market, and vegetables is riz.”
“You have come mit der waggons? You make der transport? Not?” he asked us, following up the usual formula.
We told him it was so, and that we were for the fields, and reckoned to reach Matalha by sun-up. He too, he said, was going to the gold-fields, and would be a prospector; he was just waiting for his “boy,” who had gone back for something he had forgotten at the last place. He was going to walk to Moodie’s, he said. He “did make mit one transporter a contract to come by waggons; but it was a woman mit two childs what was leave behind, and dere was no more waggons, so he will walk. It