THE LAND OF PROMISE.
The throb of the propeller has almost ceased; faint, too, is the
vibration of the slowed-down engines. The _Persian_ is gliding with
well-nigh imperceptible motion through the smooth waters of Table Bay.
It is a perfect morning, cloudless in its dazzling splendour. In front,
the huge Table Mountain rears its massive wall, dwarfing the mud-town
lying at its base and the bristling masts of shipping, its great line
mirrored in the sheeny surface. Away in the distance, the purple cones
of the Hottentots Holland mountains loom thirstily through a glimmer of
summer haze. A fair scene indeed after three weeks of endless sea and
sky.
"And what are your first impressions of my native land?"
Laurence turned.
"I was thinking less of the said land than of myself," he answered. "I
was thinking what potentialities would lie between my first impressions
of it and my last."
Just a suspicion of gravity came over Lilith Ormskirk's face at the
remark.
"And are you glad the voyage is at an end, now that it is?" she went on.
"You know I am not. It was such a rest."
"Which I was everlastingly disturbing."
"By wreathing those unholy spells. Lilith, thou sorceress, how long will
it be before those talks of ours are forgotten? A week, perhaps?"
"They will never be forgotten," she answered, her eyes dreamy and
serious. "But now, I must go below and finish doing up my things. We
shall be in dock directly."
A great crowd is collected on the quay as the steamer warps up, above
which rise sunshades coloured and coquettish, pith helmets and sweeping
puggarees, and more orthodox white "stove-pipes." Then in the
background, yellow-skinned Malays in gaudy Oriental attire,
parchment-faced Hottentots, Mozambique blacks, and lighter-hued Kaffirs
from the Eastern frontier. The docks are piled with luggage, for the
privilege of carrying which and its multifold owners Malay cab-drivers
are uttering shrill and competing yells. On board, people are bidding
each other good-bye or greeting those who have come to meet them; and
flitting among such groups, a mingled expression of alertness and
anxiety on his countenance, is here and there a steward, bent upon
sounding up a possibly elusive "tip," or refreshing an inconveniently
short memory.
Near the gangway Lilith Ormskirk was holding quite a farewell court. Her
"poodles," as Laurence had satirically defined them, were crowding
around--Swaynston at their head--for a farewell pat. The last, in the
shape of Holmes and another, had taken their sorrowful departure, and
now a quick, furtive look seemed to cross the smiling serenity of her
face, a shade of wistfulness, of disappointment. Thus one in the
hurrying throng at the other side of the deck read it.
"What a tail-wagging!" almost immediately spake a voice at her side.
She turned. Decidedly the expression was one of brightening.
"I thought you had gone--had forgotten to say good-bye," she said.
"I was waiting until the poodles had finally cleared. Now, however, I
have come to utter that not always hateful word."
"Not in this instance?"
"Yes, distinctly. I have just heard there is to be a special train made
up--we are in too late for the regular mail-train, you know. So I shall
leave for Kimberley in about two or three hours' time."
Lilith looked disappointed.
"I thought you would have stayed here at least a few days," she said.
And then the friends who had met her on board returned, and Laurence
found himself introduced to three pretty girls--fair-haired, blue-eyed,
well-dressed--eke to a man--tall, brown-faced, loosely hung, apparently
about thirty years of age--none of whose names he could quite succeed in
catching, save that the latter was apostrophized as "George." Then,
after a commonplace or two, good-byes were uttered and they
separated--Lilith and her party to catch the train for Mowbray, her late
fellow-passenger to arrange for his own much longer journey.
Having the compartment to themselves, one of the blue-eyed girls opened
fire thus:
"Lilith, who is he?"
"Who?"
"He."
"Bless the child," laughed Lilith, "there were about half a hundred
he's."
"No, there was only one. Who is he? What is he?"
"I don't know," replied Lilith, affecting ignorance no longer.
"You don't know? After three weeks on board ship together? Three whole
weeks of ship life, and you have the face to tell me you don't know
anything about him. After the way in which you said good-bye to each
other, too? Oh, I saw."
"Well, I don't know."
"Or care?"
"Chaff away, if it's any fun to you," answered Lilith quite serenely, as
the trio rippled into peals of laughter.
"I liked the man, liked to talk to him on board--you are welcome to the
admission--but all I know is that he is going to Johannesburg. We may
never see each other again."
"These English Johnnies who come out here, and whom one knows nothing
about, are now and again slippery fish," gruffly spoke the brown-faced
one. "Watch it, Lilith."
"I thought this one looked as if he might be interesting," said another
of the blue-eyed girls. "Pity he wasn't staying a day or two. We might
have got him out to the house and seen what he was made of."
"Watch it," repeated George sententiously. "Watch it, Lilith."
Meanwhile, the object of this discussion--and warning--having resignedly
"passed" the Customs at the dock gates, was spinning townwards in one of
the innumerable hansoms. Sizing up the South African metropolis, it gave
him the idea of a mud city, just dumped down wet and left to dry in the
sun. Its general aspect suggested the vagaries of some sportive Titan,
who, from the summit of the lofty rock wall behind it, had amused
himself, out of office hours, by chucking down chunks of clay of all
sorts and sizes, trying how near he could "lob" them into the position
of streets and squares.
At that time the railway line ended at Kimberley--the distance thence to
Johannesburg, close upon three hundred miles, had to be done by stage.
It occurred to Laurence that, having a couple of hours to spare, he had
better look up the coach-agent and secure a seat by wire.
The agent was not in his office. Laurence Stanninghame, however, who
knew the ways of similar countries, albeit a new arrival in this,
inquired for that functionary's favourite bar. The reply was prompt and
accurate withal. In a few minutes, seated on stools facing each other,
he and the object of his search were transacting business.
The latter did not seem entirely satisfactory. The agent could not say
when the earliest chance might occur by regular coach. He might have to
wait at Kimberley--well, it might be for days, or it might be for ever.
On the other hand, he might not even have to wait at all. He could not
tell. Even the people at the other end could not say for certain.
Laurence began to lose patience.
"See here," he said somewhat testily. "I haven't been long in your
country, but that's about the only reply I've been able to meet with to
any question yet. Tell me, as a matter of curiosity, is there any one
thing you are ever certain of out here? Just one."
The agent looked at him with faint amazement.
"There is one," he said; "just one."
"Well--and that?"
"Death. That's always a dead cert. Let's liquor. Put a name to it,
skipper."
The special train consisted of a mail van and a first-class carriage.
There being only three or four other travellers each had a compartment
to himself, an arrangement which met with Laurence Stanninghame's
unfeigned approval. He did not want to talk--especially in a clattering,
dusty railway carriage. At intervals the passengers foregathered for
meals at some wayside buffet or accommodation house,--meals whose
quality was in inverse ratio to the exuberance of the prices charged
therefor,--then each would return to his own box and smoke and read and
sleep away the little matter of seven hundred miles.
On they sped for hours and hours--on through sleepy Dutch villages,
whose gardens and cultivation made an oasis on the surrounding
flats--on, winding in a slow ascent through the gloomy grandeur of the
Hex River Poort, with its iron-bound heights rearing in mighty masses
from the level valley bottom. Then it grew dark, and, the dim oil lamp
being inadequate for reading purposes, Laurence went to sleep.
"Afar in the desert I love to ride,"
sang Pringle, the South African bard.
"Pringle was a liar, or a lunatic," quoth Laurence Stanninghame, to whom
the passage was familiar, on opening his eyes next morning and looking
around. For the train was speeding--when not slowing--through the
identical desert of which Pringle sang; that heart-breaking, dead-level,
waterless, treeless belt known as the Karroo. Not a human habitation in
sight, for hours at a stretch--the same low table-topped mountains
rising hours ahead, and which never seemed to get any closer, looking,
moreover, in the distant, mirage-effects, like vast slabs poised in
mid-air and resting on nothing. At long intervals a group of foul and
tumble-down Hottentot huts, with their squalid inhabitants--lean curs
and ape-like men; their _raison d'etre_, in the shape of a flock of
prematurely aged and disappointed-looking goats, trying all they are
worth to extract sustenance from the red shaly earth and its sparse
growth of coarse bush-like herbage. Looking out on this horrible desert,
the eye and the mind alike grow weary, and the latter starts speculating
in a shuddering sort of a way as to how the deuce anything human can
find it in its heart to exist in such a place. Yet though an awful
desert in time of drought it is not always so.
But gazing forth upon the surrounding waste, Laurence was able to read
into it a certain charm--the charm of freedom, of boundlessness, so
vividly standing out in contrast to his own cramped, narrow, shut-in
life. All the changed conditions--the wildness, the solitude, the
flaming and unclouded sun--were as a new awakening to life. The current
of a certain joy of living, long since sluggish, congealed, now coursed
swiftly and without hinderance through his being.
Now through all those hours of tedious travelling--in the flaming glow
of day, or in the still, cool watches of the night, he had with him a
recollection--Lilith Ormskirk's face haunted him. Those eyes seemed to
follow him--sweet, serious; or again mirthful, flashing from out their
dark fringe of lashes, but ever entrancing, ever inviting. Her whole
personality, in fact, seemed to pervade his mind, warring for sole
possession, to the exclusion of all other thought, all other
consideration. Into the conflict his own mind entered with a zest. It
was a psychological struggle which appealed to him, and that thoroughly.
She should not, by her witchery, take entire possession. Yet the
recollection of her was so potent that at length he ceased to strive
against it. He gave way,--abandoned himself contentedly, voluptuously to
its sway,--even aiding it in the pictures it conjured up. Now he saw
her, as he had first passed her, day after day on board ship, with
indifference, with faintly ironical curiosity; again, as when they had
first begun to talk together; and yet again, when he had found himself
resorting to all manner of cowardly mental expedients to persuade
himself that he did not revel in her dangerously winning attractiveness,
and sweet sympathetic converse. In the monotonous three-four time beat
of the wheels he could conjure up her voice--even the colonial trick of
clipping the final "r" in words ending with that letter--as to which he
had often rallied her, while secretly liking it--for this, like a touch
of the brogue, can be winsome enough when uttered by pretty lips. Now
all these reflections could not but be profitless, possibly dangerous,
yet they had this advantage--they helped to kill time, and that during a
thirty-odd-hour journey across the Karroo. Well, it is an advantage!
On through the long, hot day, and still that memory was with him. The
solitude, the stillness, the mile after mile over the desolate and
barren waste, the novelty of the scene, the monotonous rattle of the
wheels--all went to perpetuate it. Then the sun drew down to the
horizon, and the departing glow, striking upon the red soil, painted the
latter the colour of blood, making up an extraordinarily vivid study in
red and blue. Overhead a cloudless sky, the horizon all aflame, and the
whole earth, far as the eye could reach, steeped in the richest purple
red. Laurence fell fast asleep.
He dreamed they were steaming into Charing Cross Station. Lilith was
waiting to meet him. He swore, in his dream, because they had halted on
the railway bridge too long to take the tickets. Then he awoke. They
were steaming slowly into a terminus, amid the familiar flashing of
lamps and the rumbling of porters' trucks. But it was not Charing
Cross, it was Kimberley.
Not long did it take him to collect his scanty baggage and fling it into
a "cab," otherwise an open, two-seated Cape cart. Hardly had he taken
his seat than the driver uttered a war-whoop, and, with a jerk that
nearly sent its passenger somersaulting into the road, the concern
started off as hard as its eight legs and two wheels could carry it.
The night was dark, the streets guiltless of lighting. As the trap
zigzagged furiously from one side of the way to the other, now poised on
one wheel, now leaping bodily into the air as it charged through a deep
hole or rut, it was a comfort to the said passenger to reflect that the
road being feet deep in sand one was bound to fall soft anyhow. Yet,
candidly, he rather enjoyed it. After thirty-three hours in a South
African "Flying Watkin" even this spurious excitement was welcome.
They shaved corners, always on one wheel, sometimes even scraping the
corners of houses, and causing those pedestrians in their line of flight
to skip like young unicorns. Then, recovering, the startled wayfarers
would hurl their choicest blessings after the cab. To these, the madcap
driver would reply with a shrill and fiendish yell, belabouring his
frantic cattle with a view to attempting fresh feats. They succeeded. It
only wanted a bullock-waggon coming down the street to afford them the
opportunity. The bullock-waggon came. Then a dead, dull scrunch--an
awful shock--and the cab was at a standstill. The waggon people opened
their safety-valves and let off a fearful blast of profanity; the
cab-driver replied in suitable and feeling terms, then backed clear of
the wreck and whipped on.
Vastly amused by this lively experience, Laurence still ventured to
expostulate, mildly, and as a matter of form. But he got no more change
out of his present Jehu than Horace Greeley did of Hank Monk. The reply,
accompanied by a jovial guffaw, was:
"All right, mister. You sit tight, and I'll fetch you through. Which
hotel did you say?"
Laurence refreshed his memory--and swaying, jerking, pounding, into ruts
and holes, the chariot drew up like a hurricane blast before quite an
imposing-looking building at the corner of the Market Square. Having
paid off the lunatic of the whip and stood him a drink, Laurence engaged
a room, and wondered what the deuce he should do with himself if delayed
here any time. For the glimpse he had obtained of the place seemed not
inviting. The same crowded bars, the same roaring racket, the same
dust--yea, even the same thirst. He had seen it all before in other
parts of the world.
He was destined to wonder still more, and wearily, what he should do
with himself; for nearly a week went by before he could secure a seat in
the coach. A great depression came upon him, begotten of the heat and
the drowsiness and the dust, as day after day seemed to bring with it no
emancipation from the wind-swept, tin-built town, dumped down on its
surrounding flat and sad-looking desert waste. Yet nothing akin to
homesickness was there in his depression. He wanted to get onward, not
to return. He was bored and in the blues. Yet, as he looked back, the
feeling which predominated was that of freedom--of having a certain
measure of life and its prospects before him. Stay, though. His thoughts
would, at times, travel backward, and that in spite of himself, and they
would land him with a lingering, though unacknowledged, regretfulness,
on the deck of the _Persian_. Well, that was only an episode. It had
passed away out of his life, and it was as well that it had.
But--had it?
At last, to our wayfarer's unspeakable joy, deliverance came. It had
been Laurence's lot to travel in far worse conveyances than the regular
coaches which at that time performed the journey between Kimberley and
Johannesburg, a distance of close upon three hundred miles;
consequently, although not among the fortunate ones who had secured a
corner seat, he managed to make himself as comfortable as any traveller
in comparatively outlandish regions has a right to expect. His
fellow-passengers consisted, for the most part, of mechanics of the
better sort and a loquacious Jew--not at all a bad sort of fellow--in
conversation with whom he would now and then beguile the weariness of
the route. And it was weary. The flat sameness of the treeless plains,
as mile after mile brought no change; the same stony kopjes; the same
deserted and tumble-down mining structures; the same
God-forsaken-looking Dutch homesteads, whose owners had apparently taken
on the _triste_ hopelessness of their surroundings; the same miserable
wayside inns, where leathery goat-flesh and bones and rice, painted
yellow, were dispensed under the title of breakfast and dinner, what
time the coach halted to change horses, and even then only served up
when the driver was frantically vociferating, "All aboard!" Thus they
journeyed day and night, allowing, perhaps, three hours, or four at the
outside, for sleep--on a bed. But the latter proved an institution of
dubious beneficence, because of its far from dubious animation; the said
"animation" scorning blithely and imperviously accumulations of insect
powder, reaching back into the dim past, left there and added to by a
countless procession of tortured travellers. Howbeit, of these and like
discomforts are such journeyings productive, wherefore they are scarcely
to be reckoned as worthy of note.