Andrew Vine came out to Africa this year as a pilgrim, and was
disappointed. He did not go about his pilgrimage in the right way
to my thinking. For to begin with, on his own confession, he put
himself in the hands of a born organizer, who was making up a
party of fellow-travelers.
Of course they were provided with first-class tickets for the
boat, and enjoyed for sixteen days and more, in a same and narrow
scene, an amplitude of the luxuries they were used to, and tired
of. Then, dogged by a diet befitting that state to which it had
pleased Providence to call them, they rode the Great North Road
for some days in a northern express. Vine said that the Victoria
Falls were all right, but that their surroundings were, many of
them, perversely wrong. It was so very stale, the hotel business,
with the moonlight river excursions and the Livingstone trips,
far too much sleeked and smoothed by foresight, and tamed by
taking of thought. If one had only traveled up with pack donkeys,
provisioned with leathery meat and leathery damper! For Vine had
known better times in Africa. He had known pioneer adventures in
his headstrong youth but had fallen out of his Column after three
crowded months. Tempted of fever, he had made a great refusal.
And now in this year, twenty-four years after, the sense of
having seen better days at a tithe of the expense, oppressed him.
However, the tickets had been taken, and the splendidly null
organization of their party had him in its grip. He went back
from the Falls to Bulawayo, and was whisked out to Khami. Only an
hour was allowed him to see the river. At the grave of the
Matopos, he was allowed two hours. There a brooding Presence
grappled with the languors of his pilgrimage. The demoniac
discontent of that savage scene made great play with him, during
the two hours he was there, but two hours are not a very long
time. Soon they were scorching back again with an interval for
tea at a well (or ill) appointed hotel. Vine was disposed to give
up the dreary pilgrimage-game that very night, he told me. But
the born organizer, coming to him after dinner, persuaded him to
play it out. He offered to release him after the next lap the lap
of Great Zimbabwe. When that was once finished to time, he
proposed that the party should have a breather, a short spell of
civilized life at Salisbury, should it so seem good to them. Vine
could be spared for the space of that interlude. Afterwards he
would doubtless take boat with them for a cruise up the East
Coast. He would be sufficiently reinvigorated to rough it out
with them rigorously to the end. The East Coast route might not
entail quite so many hardships. Vine sighed, but he was a man of
his word. He went to Zimbabwe without a murmur. He had longed for
seventy-five miles of the dusty Umvuma post-cart, but alas, the
day was the third of the new month! The railway extension to
Victoria had been opened on the first. The organizer rubbed his
hands as he told them the glad news: 'We can have a dining-car
and sleeping berths now to within sixteen miles odd of the ruins.
We shan't need to fare so ruggedly after all. A lunch at the
"Apes and Peacocks" Hotel is about the worst of it. But we can
take out a Fortnum and Mason's hamper in the road-car that meets
us.'
So they went to the ruins. Vine, who, as a pioneer had seen the
'Temple's' torso shaggy in bush and long grass, hardly knew it
again. It had been shaven and shorn rather ruthlessly. Some of
the ruins, he noted ungratefully, were numbered to correspond
with a catalogue. There was, moreover, the glamorous sheen of a
wire fence about the whole place.
A curator participated as guide by special arrangement. A local
celebrity accompanied him; he stood for the faith of Ophir, and
smote the Egyptologist adversary not once nor twice alone. He
confessed to the ladies of the party his conviction that the
theory of an African origin was too inconceivably squalid. He
stood for the gorgeous East, he said, as against Kaffirdom. He
would not insult the culture that they brought with them by
bothering them with detailed arguments.
Meanwhile another local celebrity was employed in bossing up some
restoration work. Primitive walls were receiving trained modern
attention, and medical attendance, regardless of expense.
Vine came to me at Umvuma when the Zimbabwe visitation was over
and done. He was seeing his party off by the Salisbury train
when he caught sight of me on the platform. That night he smoked
and slept by an ox-wagon. Bread was to hand in rather frugal
measure, but there was great plenty of monkey-nuts. There was
also bush-tea, and Vine brought much tobacco. We smoked till long
after the moon set, and that was near midnight. He told me of
disappointments that had come to him through his pilgrimage being
over well-appointed.
'After all,' I said, 'you might try again next year.'
'But a year's a lot at my age. I was forty-five last month, and I
don't mean coming out again.
'So little done, so much to do, So many worlds, such things to
be.'
'Where shall we go to this week?' he went on. 'I've got a week
off from the Cook's combination. You'll give me the one week,
won't you Shall we go to Dhlo-Dhlo or Nanatali or Sinoia Caves?
It's the curse of our Cook's tour that it's mopped up the sacred
places I did want to see in a decent way the Grave, and the
Temple, and the Falls.'
'Yours is the very snobbery of pilgrimage,' I told him sternly.
'There are surely shrines on the veld that have never yet got
into a Chartered Company's guide-book.' I told him of a modest
set of ruins out our way. I couldn't well come with him in any
direction, north, south, or east or west, as he seemed to think I
could. I might get in five days between Sunday and Sunday, if he
chose our own neighborhood. He seemed glad enough to agree.
We cut food down and loads, and we started. We camped within the
precincts of the shrine, hard by a place where a fire-fused
chalice had been dug out. Ours was a fair camping-ground. A ring
of kopjes about it wore the sun's colors. To the east a spruit
was in sight, overhung in that autumn month by the mists of
morning. Within those precincts we dreamed some temple-dreams on
two golden afternoons, and slept temple-sleep on two very shiny
nights.
'My reformed pilgrimage has justified itself,' Vine told me on
the morning that we left, when we were making for my station.
'Wait a bit,' I said. 'We are arriving if all falls well, this
very night at another shrine. We have not done with our Pilgrims'
Way.'
That night we came to the farm-house where the Kents farmed and
missionized. I had expected Vine to like it and them, but I had
not guessed how much attracted he would be. The Kents were not
up-to-date, and they dressed as some people dressed in England
twenty-five years before in the period of their leaving home.
So Mrs. Kent wore on that night a chocolate-brown Liberty costume
of a Burne Jones pattern. Miss Kent was only twenty-two, and wore
rose-color, but the design of her dress was her mother's own.
Kent wore an eighties collar with old-oak plaid and a red tie, I
did not like his taste.
Vine sat and watched them with a reverential sort of gaze. He
asked Kent when they were going home, thoughtfully. But Kent told
him that they did not think of going home again, only up the
coast to Zanzibar, or down to Inhambane, when they wanted change
and holiday. 'That's splendid,' said Vine emphatically. 'Don't go
home. It's not what it used to be. I feel sure you would not like
it.'
After supper we had music, and Kent kept on singing, at Vine's
particular request. I did not take much notice of what he was
singing till Vine came and spoke to me. Then I saw how excited he
was, and I listened with attention.
'Do you remember that?' he said. 'It was the song that Oriel man
used to sing.' Then I recognized 'Our Last Waltz,' and afterwards
'In Sweet September.' I remembered both as the songs of a man
whose wedding we both had attended, in the very year that we went
down.
We shared a hut behind the mission homestead, and shared much
converse before we slept.
'It's purple and gold,' Vine said. 'I came out to find a beastly
ruin.'
'And you find the Victorian Sixth Decade mummified,' I said.
'Don't sneer!'
'Well, pressed in lavender,' I amended.
For early did'st thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
'That describes Kent's Hegira, doesn't it? He's stopped where we
two were, when we went down, in ever so many ways.'
'Hurray!' cried Vine, tossing his boot up, 'I came out to find a
beastly ruin, and I've found my lost youth, nothing more nor
less! Bless you!'
But his ecstasy was to culminate on the following morning. Kent
had mounted him on one of his two mules, and piloted him on the
other to see some Bush paintings three miles away.
I grew a little uneasy, they were so long gone, for I knew well
what a lot of country lay between us and my own mission station.
I was due there by sunrise or soon after, on the morrow. Mrs.
Kent was strumming away on the piano old dance tunes that I
remembered barrel-organ melodies of now remote days, days when a
bi-weekly shave sufficed me. I stood in the doorway and beat
time. Whenever were we going to get started at this rate? At last
the mules came cantering up the wagon-road.
'Get a move on,' I shouted to Vine as he pulled up before the
door. But just at that moment Mrs. Kent began on 'The Reign of
the Roses.' Vine, who had kicked a foot out of its stirrup, did
not dismount. He sat drinking in the dance-measure. Louder and
louder she played the air, and, humming it over, he drove his
foot home. Shaking up the reins, he cantered his mule round and
round the sun-dial in front of the door. Round and round he went,
still humming, while those wiry and sun-burnt wrists pounded away
at the dance-music.
'How long is this going on?' I pleaded. I began to see the humor
of the thing when I watched our carriers. They were gaping as at
a new kind of circus. At last Mrs. Kent gave over, not very soon,
however; the melody was evidently a favorite of hers.
'Is there not a cause?' pleaded Vine, when he had dismounted
lingeringly, and was facing my reproaches for his wanton delay.
He muttered something about a merry-go-round. Afterwards he
explained, when we were making up for lost time along the big
vlei.
'It was that night when we got to Goring,' he reminded me, 'when
we went down to Henley in that double-sculler at the end of our
first summer term 1888, the first week in July. There was a
village fair on that night, and we rode round on the horses, ever
so many pennyworths. That was the tune I remembered best of all
the tunes that the steam-organ played. Don't you remember?' And
strange to say, I did.
He played the game with the organizer, rapt though he was by his
memory of the steam-organ, I will say that much for him. He took
the trouble to go all the way up to Salisbury, and to beg him to
have him excused. And he was successful. I don't quite know what
excuse he gave. It was scarcely likely to be so crude as the
excuse I guessed at, 'I want to marry a wife, and therefore I
cannot go.' He unbosomed himself to me engagingly when he came
back from Salisbury. He appealed to my compassionate sympathy.
'Just fancy! Forty-five and no real home!' he said, 'And here
I've come on pilgrimage, and found just what I've unconsciously
craved youth and beauty up-to-date, not this date but the date of
my own unforgotten youth 1888 in lavender, so to speak.'
I wished him luck in his wooing of Miss Kent. If Mrs. Kent had
been a widow, I should have thought her much more suitable. He
gave the bridle-reins a shake, and rode away on an old salted
horse he had bought, walking had grown much too slow for him.
He won Joan Kent, and fixed it up with her late-Victorian parents
to their mutual content.
The wedding date is chosen already it is June 20th a day hallowed
enough, having twice been Jubilee Day. I think Vine would have
preferred May 24th as having been Victoria Day. But Joan objected
to her wedding taking place in Our Lady's May month.