'If you come back, which Heaven ordain, you'll be all the more
use to the priesthood,' the Superintendent of Missions said. 'Go
and serve with our fearless and faithful, approach as an acolyte
the altar of freedom. Supposing you don't see your way to go, I
would remind you of a certain passage about "Curse ye Meroz!" I
need not insult your knowledge of the Scriptures by finishing my
quotation.'
Osborne listened respectfully, but his eyes were looking far
away, with dreams of the veld in them.
The Superintendent's preaching of a sort of Christian Jehad
appealed to him infinitesimally.
There was a silence. He knocked his pipe out, and offered the
Superintendent a sundowner.
'I'm glad to have had your opinion,' he said. 'I take it you
don't want me just now as a candidate for ordination?'
The Superintendent flushed and hesitated.
'You mustn't put it like that,' he said almost irritably. 'The
decision rests with you, of course. Of course we want men now and
want them badly. Yet I wouldn't press my recruiting needs just
now. It doesn't seem to me the right time to do so. Afterwards. . . . '
He gulped and spluttered as the big words rushed so fast to his
lips.
He was enlarging on the big days for God's priesthood, when the
war, please God, should be over. Big days, that is to say, if the
only sort of fit and proper issue should be reached, as doubtless
it would be before long.
'You mean a complete knock-out for the other side?' his hearer
interpolated crudely.
'I mean a supreme vindication of our holy cause,' amended the
Superintendent with conviction.
Then they changed the subject.
Afterwards, when they smoked late on the lamp-lit stoep,
conversation was apt to flag a little. The layman's eyes would
grow abstracted in the intervals of his ceremonious hospitality.
The Superintendent watched his face intently once or twice. The
man was a mystery to him. He had an uneasy sense that he had not
taken his measure, and had been responsible for some sort of a
misfit more than once in conversation. Why was he not more like
ordinary people? Probably because he had lived a lonely life on
the veld much too long. The Superintendent was conscious of a
profound distrust of the untamed veld, its influence and its
inhabitants. Yet his natural kindliness, reinforced assuredly by
his grace of orders and Christian sense of duty, strove quite
heroically against that distrust.
David Osborne walked over to see me next week, but he did not
find me at home; I was camping with a native teacher's wagon some
twenty miles away.
He slept at my place, and came on after me. A thirty miles' tramp
or so it meant to overtake me, but he did not shrink from it. He
wanted to think out things, and he liked foot-slogging on a big
scale as a stimulus to thought. I was on a high ledge above the
windings of the Sawi River when he found me a ledge with a great
view of the Wedza hills. The sun was going down then, and their
blue was just dying into purple. I got him some tea, and he drank
and ate like a veldsman one who had broken his journey but little
since he broke his morning fast. He told me the Superintendent's
point of view, which I have already chronicled. 'It provides a
certain amount of excuse,' Osborne said, 'for what I want to do.
That's about all I can say for it.'
'Then you want to go?' I asked.
'I want a change,' he said, 'and adventures and all that. As to
any war's being a holy war, that's Greek to me.' I smiled. I
understood what he meant.
I had only just come back from a limited experience of war as a
non-combatant. 'Why don't you say outright what you think?' he
pressed me. 'The Superintendent does do that apparently, I'll say
that much for him. Isn't Saint Telemachus still your bright
particular star of Christian sainthood in wartime? And isn't
Tolstoy still in your eyes a sort of forlorn hope the most
hopeful of modern war-time philosophers? Or have you changed all
that?'