DISSENSIONS.
"Well, I'm uncommonly glad I was out of that affair yesterday,
Stanninghame. But it isn't like you, letting those poor devils off, eh?"
Thus Holmes, as the two were leisurely pursuing their way, somewhat on
the rear flank of the slave-party.
"I don't know. You see they let me off, and I didn't want to be outdone
in civility even by a lot of scurvy dogs who eat each other. There was
no feeling about the matter."
Before the other could pursue the subject, the sound of faint groans,
and pleading in an unknown tongue, was heard just ahead. With it, too,
the sound of blows.
"Some devilish work going forward again," muttered Holmes, with savage
disgust.
"You can't make omelettes without breaking eggs," was the indifferent
reply. And then they came upon a not entirely unfamiliar scene.
On the ground crouched three human figures, wretched-looking and
emaciated to the last degree. Disease and exhaustion had overpowered
them, and they were begging to be left to die. Standing over them in
threatening attitude was Lutali, with some half-dozen of the slavers.
"They are too far gone to feel the whip," Lutali was saying. "Clearly
they are of no further use. You, Murad, shorten me the shadow of yonder
dog. We shall see."
The man named, a savage-looking ruffian, stepped forward, grinning with
delight. Just as he was swinging up his scimitar, Holmes burst forth:
"Hold on, Lutali! Give the poor devil another show."
Half turning his head at this interruption, there was that look upon the
hawk-like features of the Arab which at times so strangely resembled
Hazon. His keen eyes darted haughty reproof at Holmes, for he was a sort
of supercargo of the slave department, and relished not this
interference. Then, turning back, he once more gave the signal. Down
flashed the great blade. There was a dull swooshing thud, and the
headless trunk was deluging the earth.
The effect, however, upon the other two exhausted wretches was magical.
With a despairing effort they raised themselves up and staggered on, to
the accompaniment of not a few blows by way of recognition of their
malingering. Lutali, who had uttered no word, and whose impassive
countenance had not moved a feature, stalked gravely on.
"Why could we not have prevented this?" burst forth Holmes, whom a sort
of morbid fascination seemed to root to the spot.
"Because it would have been the very acme of insanity to attempt such a
thing. Lutali, in common with the rest, is in far too ugly a mood, after
yesterday, to be fooled with needlessly. Besides, all that sentiment is
simply thrown away. These people, remember, are atrocious brutes, who
eat their own fathers and mothers. It is positively a work of charity to
enslave them. Once they are off the march they are fairly well
treated,--better, in fact, than they treat each other--and, of course,
no more cannibalism."
"That may be. But I wish to Heaven I could blot out these two years as
though they had never been. The recollection of the horrors one has been
through will haunt me for life. I feel like blowing my brains out in
sheer disgust. Why did I ever come?"
It was not the first time Holmes had burst forth in this fashion, as we
have shown. Laurence looked keenly at him.
"There is a worse thing to haunt one's life than recollection," he said,
"and that is anticipation."
"Of what?" asked Holmes shortly.
The other touched the muzzle of his rifle, then his own forehead.
"It's that--or this," he said, pointing to the ghastly trunk and the
severed head which lay before them. "You don't suppose I should have
adopted this sweet trade from choice, I suppose? No. Hard necessity, my
dear chap. If anybody has to go under--and somebody always has to--I
prefer that it shall not be me."
Holmes made no reply for a while, so they left the spot, walking in
silence. Then Laurence went on:
"Now we are on the subject, I don't know that you would have come out
any the better had we left you behind at Johannesburg. For you were
going the wrong way. You were a precious sight too fond of hanging
around bars, and that sort of thing grows. In fact, you were more than
once a trifle--shall we say 'muddled.' Not to put too fine a point upon
it, you were on your way to the deuce. I know it, for I've seen it so
often before, and you know it too."
"I believe you're right there," assented Holmes.
"Well, then, we owe our first duty to ourselves; wherefore, my
soft-hearted young friend, it is better to spend a year or two raking in
a fortune and ameliorating the lot of humanity, than to die in a state
of soak, and a disused shaft, on or around the Rand, even as did Pulman
the day before we left."
"I don't believe that same fortune will do us any good," urged Holmes
gloomily. "There is the curse of blood upon it."
"The curse of my grandmother," laughed the other.
There was no affectation about Laurence Stanninghame's indifference. It
was perfectly genuine. Strong-nerved constitutionally, callous,
hard-hearted through stress of circumstances, such sights as that just
witnessed told not one atom upon him. In the sufferings of the miserable
wretches he saw only a lurid alternative--his own. In them, toiling
along, wearily, dejectedly, beneath the chain or yoke, he saw himself,
toiling, grinding, at some sordid and utterly repellent form of labour,
for a miserable pittance; no ray of light, no redeeming rest or
enjoyment to sweeten life until that life should end. In them, cowering,
writhing, beneath the driver's brutal lash, he saw himself, ever lashed
and stung by the torturing consciousness of what might have been, by the
recollection of what had been. Or did they fall exhausted, fainting, to
die, or to undergo decapitation to insure that such exhaustion should
not open even a feeble possibility of escape, there too, he saw himself
sinking, borne down by the sheer blank hopelessness of fate, taking
refuge in the Dark Unknown, his end the grave of the suicide. It was
himself or them, and he preferred that it should be them. Preyer or
preyed upon--such was the iron immutable law of life, from man in his
highest development to the minutest of insects; and with this law he was
but complying, not in wanton cruelty, but in cold, passive ruthlessness.
Further, the sufferings of these people were only transitory. They would
be much better off when the journey was ended and they were disposed
of--better off indeed than many a free person in civilized and Christian
lands. Besides, such races as these, low down as they were in the scale
of humanity, suffered but little. It needs imagination, refinement, to
accentuate suffering. To anything approaching such attributes, these
were utter strangers. They were mere animals. Men dealt in sheep and
cattle, in order to live, in horses and other beasts of burden, why not
in these, who were even lower than the higher animals?
This theory of their sinister occupation Hazon thoroughly indorsed.
"Depend upon it, Stanninghame," he said, "ours is the right view to take
of it--the only view. This is 'a world of plunder and prey,' as Tennyson
puts it, and we have got to prey or be preyed upon. You, for instance,
seem to have fulfilled the latter role, hitherto, and it seems only
right you should have your turn now. To cite the latest instance, all
this rotten scrip and market-rigging finished you off, and what was that
but rascality?"
"Of course, I've been plundered, swindled, all along the line, ever
since I can remember. I'm tired of that d----d respectability, Hazon. It
doesn't pay. It never has paid. This, however, does."
The other smiled significantly at the word.
"Respectability--yes," he said. "Look at your type of success, your
self-made man, swelling out of his white waistcoat in snug
self-complacency, your pattern British merchant, your millionaire
financier, what is he but a slave-dealer, a slave-driver, a
blood-sucker. What has become of your little all, swamped in those
precious Rand companies, Stanninghame? Gone to bloat more unimpeachable
white waistcoats; gone to add yet more pillars to the temple of pattern
respectability."
"That's so," assented Laurence, with something between a sneer and a
laugh, knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "Yet that same crowd of
respectable swindlers would yelp in horror at us and our enterprise.
'Piratical,' they'd call it, eh? A hanging matter!"
"Swindlers--no. Swindler is English for a convicted person. Yet the
percentage of the props and pillars of financial success and mercantile
respectability who, in the self-candour and secrecy of their sleepless
hours, are honestly unable to recall to mind one or more occasions when
Portland, or Dartmoor, or Simonstown, or the Kowie loomed more than
near, cannot be a vast one; which, for present purposes, may be taken
to mean that if you have got to make money you must make it anyhow, or
not at all--'anyhow' covering such methods as are involved in the
conventional term 'rascality.' If you have got it you can run as
straight as you like. We haven't got it--at least not enough of it
yet--and so we are making it, and, like the rest of the world, making it
anyhow. There's the whole case in a nutshell, Stanninghame."
"Why, of course. But, if only we could bring Holmes round to that
pre-eminently sensible standpoint! I never could have believed the
fellow would turn out such an ass. I am more than sorry, Hazon, that I
should have influenced you to bring him along."
"Oh, Holmes is young, and hardly knows the meaning of the term 'hard
experience,' as we know it. Still, in his way, he's useful enough, and
first-rate in a fight; and when he comes to bank his share he'll forget
to feel over particular as to how he acquired it. That's mere ordinary
human nature, and Holmes is far from being an abnormal unit."
"No, but he still affects a conscience. What if he goes back and takes
on that blue-eyed girl he was smitten with, and, turning soft,
incontinently gives us away?"
"Are _you_ on the croak, Stanninghame? That's odd. Here, how's your
pulse? Let's time it." And Hazon reached out his hand.
"Well, yes; it is unusual. But it's d----d hot, and the steaminess of it
depresses me at times," returned Laurence, with a queer, reckless laugh.
"He won't give us away, never fear," said Hazon carelessly. "He won't
take on that girl, because she'll have forgotten him long ago; that,
too, being ordinary human nature. And--nobody ever did give me away yet.
I don't somehow think anybody is ever likely to."
Both sides of this remark struck a chord within Laurence's mind; the
first, a jarring one, since it voiced a misgiving which had at times
assailed himself, specially at such periods of depression as this under
which he was now suffering. For the second, the tone was characteristic
of the speaker and the subject. It seemed to flash forth more than a
menace, in its stern, unrelenting ruthlessness of purpose, while the
words seemed to recall the warning so darkly let fall by Rainsford and
others regarding his present confederate. "Other men have gone up
country with Hazon, but--_not one of them has ever returned_." To
himself the words contained no menace. He trusted Hazon, felt thoroughly
able to take care of himself, and, moreover, was as little likely to
violate the secrecy of their enterprise as Hazon himself. But what of
Holmes? With all his hard, callous unscrupulousness, Laurence had no
desire that harm should befall Holmes. In a measure, he felt responsible
for him.
"Don't you worry about Holmes," said Hazon, as though reading his
thoughts. "We can put him to all the show part of the business,
reserving the more serious line for our own immediate supervision. And
the time may come when we can do very well with Holmes, in short, when
three white men may be better than two. We are very near the Ba-gcatya
country, and an _impi_ of them on the raid will give us as much trouble
as we can do with; and I've seen signs of late which seem to point that
way."
"Isn't it a crowded-on business this Ba-gcatya terror, eh?" said
Laurence, lazily puffing out rings of blue smoke, which hung upon the
hot, still atmosphere as though they never meant to disperse. "I expect
their strength is as exaggerated as their dash. Why, this part is not
altogether unexplored, yet there is no record of an exceptionally strong
tribe hereabouts."
Hazon smiled pityingly.
"That great god, the African explorer, don't know everything," he
said--"no, not quite everything, although he thinks he does. Anyway, he
frequently manages to get a pretty muddled-up idea of things and places
hereabout--a muddle which the natives of this land would rather thicken
than dispel. For instance, he will ask the name of a river or a
mountain, and when the other party to the talk repeats his question, as
natives invariably do to gain time for answering, he takes this for the
answer, and forthwith the thing is dubbed by a word that simply means
'river' or 'mountain,' in one or other of the hundred and fifty tongues
which prevail hereabout. No, the existence of the Ba-gcatya is not
chronicled, simply because the explorer was fortunate enough not to fall
in with them. Had he done so, he would probably never have returned to
chronicle anything. But, get one or two of our Wangoni to talk, and he
may, or may not, tell you something about them; for the Ba-gcatya are,
like the Wangoni themselves, a Zulu offshoot, only far more conservative
in the old Zulu traditions, and of purer blood. They are a much finer
race, indeed I believe them to be as powerful and well disciplined as
the Zulus themselves were under Cetywayo. I was all through the war of
'79, you know, and that pretty scar I carry about as an ornament
represents the expiring effort of an awful tough customer, who had lost
too much blood to be able to strike altogether home. I call it my
Isandhlwana medal."
"That where you captured it, eh?" said Laurence, with interest, for the
story was new to him. He remembered first noticing the great scar upon
Hazon's chest the day he visited him when ill in bed at Johannesburg,
but he had never asked its history; indeed, it was characteristic of the
strange relations in which these two men stood to each other that,
notwithstanding all this time of close comradeship, neither should ever
have asked the other any question of a personal nature. Characteristic,
too, was it of Hazon's method that this piece of information should have
been vouchsafed as it was. Many an experience, strange and startling,
had he narrated from time to time, but never for the sake of narrating
it. If anything occurred to bring it forth, out it would come, carrying,
perhaps, others in its train, but ever in due sequence. Even Holmes, the
impulsive, who, being young, was the 'natural man' of the trio, had long
since learned that to ask Hazon for a yarn was the direct way not to get
one out of him.
"Yes," went on Hazon, "that's where I captured it. Speaking with some
experience, Isandhlwana is the toughest thing that has ever travelled my
way, and I don't hanker after any repetition of it with 'The people of
the Spider----' Why, what does this mean?"
The words, quick, hurried, broke off. On the faces of both men was a
look of keen, anxious alertness. For a wild and fierce clamour had
suddenly arisen and was drawing nearer and nearer, loud, swelling,
threatening.