We had been going sixteen days on the home course to England, and
I had come to know him fairly well. He was a seaman who had
sailed the self-same mail-boat for some years past. I remembered
him on a brighter trip in summer-time when I was a good deal
younger and took the languors of the voyage less slumberously.
Now it was winter-time on the home-side of the Line, and I was
sailing under a cloud of news grave and stern. So I was rather
prone to see most things as much alike in a sort of dream of
neutral colors. My seafaring friend had helped me in the sultry
nights further south, had shown me a sleeping place high up among
the ropes, had called me in the grey dawn, or warned me when
lightning flashed and it seemed that a downpour threatened.
Afterwards we had passed Madeira, a cheering vista with its white
walls and red roofs and purple bougainvillea, and settled down
into wintry weather and storm-vexed seas. Now the last night up
the Channel had come, and the weather was calmer. We had seen the
scowling Ushant coast in the sun and shower of an icy mid-day. So
we were looking for a light to show very soon now an English
light, a Dorset light and the pulse of our chill quickened to
racing rhythm. 'How many voyages have you made before this one?'
I asked my friend as we leant over a rail together. He mentioned
an astonishing number. 'You must know a lot about the things that
I want to know' I said, 'the going to and fro of people, their
starting out and their coming back again. Doesn't it all seem
pretty stale to you by now?' 'No,' he said; 'it's my living, and
besides that it interests me watching the game. It's an
interesting bit of the game that I see, don't you think, sir,
coming to the fringes of two Promised Lands, and not tackling the
job of settling down in either? I've got interests, though, in
both of them.' He was silent, and we both filled our pipes again.
This friend of mine interested me: his reading tastes had
surprised me: he borrowed Mr. Masefield's works and Miss Olive
Schreiner's, but I had not often found him communicative till
that last night before reaching home. 'I'm better where I am
earning a sure living,' he went on. 'I've got a boy put to school
at Southampton; no, not mine I'm not married. But he's staying at
school a long while. I don't particularly want him to go out to
South Africa, speaking for myself. His father didn't do
particularly well there as people reckon, but yet I don't know.
He enjoyed his life in his own way, I think. I saw enough of him
to understand that, and the boy seems bound to go back there:
bound or tied's the very word. He was born up the country, and
carried on a Kaffir woman's back in her goatskin, and knew more
Kaffir than English, and wore veld-schoen when he came back on
the boat with me.' 'When was that?' I asked. 'When his father,
Walter Holmes, came aboard seven years ago come this next March.
That was the second time his father traveled with me. He came on
before, fifteen years earlier, when first he traveled to Africa,
and I remembered him well enough. I was on the old boat. I've
only served on the two boats all my time.' 'What did he go out to
do?' I asked. 'Oh! he went up to join the pioneers at Kimberley.
A counter-jumper he'd been, and he'd got his head all stuffed
full. It was 1890, one of Rhodes' big years, the year they went
north. It would have done you good to hear him talk. He was so
keen, and his eyes glowed. Just like the water glows near the
keel in the tropics.' 'That must have been a time,' I said; 'I've
only read about it. It was before I saw the country.' The sailor
grinned and spat. 'I reckon there hadn't been better days for
young fellows to live in,' he said, 'not since Queen Elizabeth's
reign. It came just between the two Jubilees the time. Kimberley
and Rhodesia and the native wars and the Raid, and the big war
looming on ahead for by and by. I reckon it was something like it
was in Drake's and Hawkins' and Sir Walter's days.' That was a
new view to me. But it sounded likely enough to hear him bring it
out, who believed in it so evidently. 'It was all Ophir and El
Dorado,' he went on; 'I used to hear lots of it from people to
and fro. I'd see them going out to Africa and all the excitement
after the lagging times along the coast, when they came with the
dawn into Table Bay. I'd see them coming back, too, greedy enough
to see Portland Light then, like that stout party over there.' He
pointed to a paunchy miner who was flinging his leather cap up.
'He's seen it,' he said; 'yes, look there! One! Two! Three!
'Four!'
My own eyes glowed and my heart hopped up and down. Yonder was a
verity of England once more after years of absence. People came
along to our corner of the deck and questioned and stared and
laughed to one another. 'But I want to hear the end of that
story,' I said, and I enticed him away with me past the wheel-house
to a place far out of the talk and the tramping up and down.
'How used the people to come back, did you say?' I asked him.
'Oh! some had done fairly well,' he said, 'and some were
broken, but it was good to see how slow they found the boat go,
getting back again, and how they hung on the lights.' 'Yet they
didn't stay long in England some of them?' I hazarded. 'No,' he
said; 'I'd see some coming back, and hear of lots more. The same
thing over again it would seem when we came into Table Bay, only
they were a bit older.' 'But some didn't come home to England,
did they?' I wanted him to tell me. 'No,' he said; 'you're right
there no doubt. This friend of mine named Holmes took a long time
coming. But I heard from him sometimes when he was up country. He
found the business of settling Canaan rough, I gathered. I think
I'm glad I heard about it from a distance. It mightn't have
suited me.' 'And he got married up there, did you say?' 'Yes, his
girl came out on this ship when he'd been out seven years or so.
He used to write to me sometimes, and he arranged about the boat
she came by. She was full of the farm she was going to; he had
written about it. She seemed to think that it was a regular
Kentish homestead. She wrote afterwards and thanked me for
looking after her on the voyage, and said she had found two huts
on a kopje when she got there. All their cattle died when her boy
was about six years old. Then she died. Holmes had a lot of
trouble that year. So he sold up and came on board the year
after. Waited for my boat, worse luck, and contracted enteric in
Cape Town. I thought we should lose him off Cape Verde. But it
wasn't a clammy night the night we passed the wind blew fresh and
we got him by. How he longed for home, for settling down in Kent.
Rhodesia was all very well when one was young, he had said. She
hadn't treated him so very well, but she had taught him to value
things at home. I thought we might land him home after all, when
we were a whole day or so past Cape Verde. But that night a
change came and he was gone. We dropped him over at sunrise, only
four or five hours after, so as not to cast a gloom over the
passengers, you understand.' 'And you took on his child?' I
asked. 'Yes, and wanted him to settle down in the south country.
No, not Africa Kent I mean. I thought I'd settle down with him in
the better of my two countries. For it is the better. I who've
looked down at both, like Moses on the mountain, have found out
that much. But it doesn't look a bit now as if he'll believe
in my advice.' 'And if he goes out, you'll follow him?' I
questioned. He smiled. 'I think I'll be simple enough for it,' he
said; 'I seem to want to renew my youth. I somehow used to be
sorry I missed my chance to follow his father up. Now that
generation's about gone the generation of King Solomon's Mines.
It doesn't seem like putting myself forward so much if the boy
himself asks me to come up with him, does it, sir?' 'And you want
to go.' 'Well if you look over Moses' Moabitish mountain long
enough, at a promised land, so to speak, you may get a hankering
to go in,' he said. 'It's not a better country. It's not a
heavenly; I don't make any mistake about that. But it's a country
that people have thought big things about, if they have carried
them out badly. I seem to have seen something of the right and
the wrong of it all these nights coming north to Southampton
Water or south into Table Bay.' 'And what's the conclusion of the
whole matter?' I said. We were almost alone on the deck now.
(There was just one lonely, lanky passenger strolling up and
down. I guessed that the rest were in bed, or going to bed or
having a last drink below. We went down the deck together and
took our stand behind that forsaken watcher of the shore-light.
He stood at gaze, pulling deeply from his pipe and drinking in
the four-a-time flashes with owlish contentment.) 'Oh! the
conclusion's what Solomon said right enough,' he muttered. 'Fear
and keep, and keep and fear. Perhaps he'd been out and visited
the men on his mines up-country.' He paused. I seemed to hear the
jingling of bar-glasses in a back-veld canteen as he did so. The
thud of drums, too, from Kaffir villages seemed to bear down on
us. The Channel breeze came to me as it were heavily laden with
the sounding challenges of the South. 'I suppose,' I said, 'it
makes a big difference when one loses the northern star. Those
southern skies painted with unnumbered sparks are all very well,
but one lacks the pole-star of honor one steered by in England.'
'Yes,' he said, 'It's there I reckon the Southern Cross comes in,
and people going south make a mistake not to notice it. When
one's out of sight of the old compass-point of English opinion
one feels the want of believing, if one's to make any sort
of a show. It's a bad look-out if, when one lives under the
Southern Cross, one can't understand it. Fear God and keep His
Commandments. Do you think God would have put that cluster of
stars to south if the South did not need it most?'