MR WARDLAW HAS A PREMONITION
A week later the building job was finished, I locked the door of the
new store, pocketed the key, and we set out for home. Sikitola was
entrusted with the general care of it, and I knew him well enough to be
sure that he would keep his people from doing mischief. I left my empty
wagons to follow at their leisure and rode on, with the result that I
arrived at Blaauwildebeestefontein two days before I was looked for.
I stabled my horse, and went round to the back to see Colin. (I had
left him at home in case of fights with native dogs, for he was an ill
beast in a crowd.) I found him well and hearty, for Zeeta had been
looking after him. Then some whim seized me to enter the store through
my bedroom window. It was open, and I crawled softly in to find the
room fresh and clean from Zeeta’s care. The door was ajar, and, hearing
voices, I peeped into the shop.
Japp was sitting on the counter talking in a low voice to a big
native—the same ’Mwanga whom I had bundled out unceremoniously. I
noticed that the outer door giving on the road was shut, a most unusual
thing in the afternoon. Japp had some small objects in his hand, and
the two were evidently arguing about a price. I had no intention at
first of eavesdropping, and was just about to push the door open, when
something in Japp’s face arrested me. He was up to no good, and I
thought it my business to wait.
The low tones went on for a little, both men talking in Kaffir, and
then Japp lifted up one of the little objects between finger and thumb.
It was a small roundish stone about the size of a bean, but even in
that half light there was a dull lustre in it.
At that I shoved the door open and went in. Both men started as if they
had been shot. Japp went as white as his mottled face permitted. “What
the—” he gasped, and he dropped the thing he was holding.
I picked it up, and laid it on the counter. “So,” I said, “diamonds, Mr
Japp. You have found the pipe I was looking for. I congratulate you.”
My words gave the old ruffian his cue. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I have, or
rather my friend ’Mwanga has. He has just been telling me about it.”
The Kaffir looked miserably uncomfortable. He shifted from one leg to
the other, casting longing glances at the closed door.
“I tink I go,” he said. “Afterwards we will speak more.”
I told him I thought he had better go, and opened the door for him.
Then I bolted it again, and turned to Mr Japp.
“So that’s your game,” I said. “I thought there was something funny
about you, but I didn’t know it was I.D.B. you were up to.”
He looked as if he could kill me. For five minutes he cursed me with a
perfection of phrase which I had thought beyond him. It was no I.D.B.,
he declared, but a pipe which ’Mwanga had discovered. “In this kind of
country?” I said, quoting his own words. “Why, you might as well expect
to find ocean pearls as diamonds. But scrape in the spruit if you like;
you’ll maybe find some garnets.”
He choked down his wrath, and tried a new tack. “What will you take to
hold your tongue? I’ll make you a rich man if you’ll come in with me.”
And then he started with offers which showed that he had been making a
good thing out of the traffic.
I stalked over to him, and took him by the shoulder. “You old
reprobate,” I roared, “if you breathe such a proposal to me again, I’ll
tie you up like a sack and carry you to Pietersdorp.”
At this he broke down and wept maudlin tears, disgusting to witness. He
said he was an old man who had always lived honestly, and it would
break his heart if his grey hairs were to be disgraced. As he sat
rocking himself with his hands over his face, I saw his wicked little
eyes peering through the slits of his fingers to see what my next move
would be.
“See here, Mr Japp,” I said, “I’m not a police spy, and it’s no
business of mine to inform against you. I’m willing to keep you out of
gaol, but it must be on my own conditions. The first is that you resign
this job and clear out. You will write to Mr Colles a letter at my
dictation, saying that you find the work too much for you. The second
is that for the time you remain here the diamond business must utterly
cease. If ’Mwanga or anybody like him comes inside the store, and if I
get the slightest hint that you’re back at the trade, in you go to
Pietersdorp. I’m not going to have my name disgraced by being
associated with you. The third condition is that when you leave this
place you go clear away. If you come within twenty miles of
Blaauwildebeestefontein and I find you, I will give you up.”
He groaned and writhed at my terms, but in the end accepted them. He
wrote the letter, and I posted it. I had no pity for the old scamp, who
had feathered his nest well. Small wonder that the firm’s business was
not as good as it might be, when Japp was giving most of his time to
buying diamonds from native thieves. The secret put him in the power of
any Kaffir who traded him a stone. No wonder he cringed to ruffians
like ’Mwanga.
The second thing I did was to shift my quarters. Mr Wardlaw had a spare
room which he had offered me before, and now I accepted it. I wanted to
be no more mixed up with Japp than I could help, for I did not know
what villainy he might let me in for. Moreover, I carried Zeeta with
me, being ashamed to leave her at the mercy of the old bully. Japp went
up to the huts and hired a slattern to mind his house, and then drank
heavily for three days to console himself.
That night I sat smoking with Mr Wardlaw in his sitting-room, where a
welcome fire burned, for the nights on the Berg were chilly. I remember
the occasion well for the queer turn the conversation took. Wardlaw, as
I have said, had been working like a slave at the Kaffir tongues. I
talked a kind of Zulu well enough to make myself understood, and I
could follow it when spoken; but he had real scholarship in the thing,
and knew all about the grammar and the different dialects. Further, he
had read a lot about native history, and was full of the doings of
Tchaka and Mosilikatse and Moshesh, and the kings of old. Having little
to do in the way of teaching, he had made up for it by reading
omnivorously. He used to borrow books from the missionaries, and he
must have spent half his salary in buying new ones.
To-night as he sat and puffed in his armchair, he was full of stories
about a fellow called Monomotapa. It seems he was a great black emperor
whom the Portuguese discovered about the sixteenth century. He lived to
the north in Mashonaland, and had a mountain full of gold. The
Portuguese did not make much of him, but they got his son and turned
him into a priest.
I told Wardlaw that he was most likely only a petty chief, whose
exploits were magnified by distance, the same as the caciques in
Mexico. But the schoolmaster would not accept this.
“He must have been a big man, Davie. You know that the old ruins in
Rhodesia, called Zimbabwe, were long believed to be Phoenician in
origin. I have a book here which tells all about them. But now it is
believed that they were built by natives. I maintain that the men who
could erect piles like that”—and he showed me a picture—”were something
more than petty chiefs.”
Presently the object of this conversation appeared. Mr Wardlaw thought
that we were underrating the capacity of the native. This opinion was
natural enough in a schoolmaster, but not in the precise form Wardlaw
put it. It was not his intelligence which he thought we underrated, but
his dangerousness. His reasons, shortly, were these: There were five or
six of them to every white man; they were all, roughly speaking, of the
same stock, with the same tribal beliefs; they had only just ceased
being a warrior race, with a powerful military discipline; and, most
important, they lived round the rim of the high-veld plateau, and if
they combined could cut off the white man from the sea. I pointed out
to him that it would only be a matter of time before we opened the road
again. “Ay,” he said, “but think of what would happen before then.
Think of the lonely farms and the little dorps wiped out of the map. It
would be a second and bloodier Indian mutiny. “I’m not saying it’s
likely,” he went on, “but I maintain it’s possible. Supposing a second
Tchaka turned up, who could get the different tribes to work together.
It wouldn’t be so very hard to smuggle in arms. Think of the long,
unwatched coast in Gazaland and Tongaland. If they got a leader with
prestige enough to organize a crusade against the white man, I don’t
see what could prevent a rising.”
“We should get wind of it in time to crush it at the start,” I said.
“I’m not so sure. They are cunning fellows, and have arts that we know
nothing about. You have heard of native telepathy. They can send news
over a thousand miles as quick as the telegraph, and we have no means
of tapping the wires. If they ever combined they could keep it as
secret as the grave. My houseboy might be in the rising, and I would
never suspect it till one fine morning he cut my throat.”
“But they would never find a leader. If there was some exiled prince of
Tchaka’s blood, who came back like Prince Charlie to free his people,
there might be danger; but their royalties are fat men with top hats
and old frock-coats, who live in dirty locations.”
Wardlaw admitted this, but said that there might be other kinds of
leaders. He had been reading a lot about Ethiopianism, which educated
American negroes had been trying to preach in South Africa. He did not
see why a kind of bastard Christianity should not be the motive of a
rising. “The Kaffir finds it an easy job to mix up Christian emotion
and pagan practice. Look at Hayti and some of the performances in the
Southern States.”
Then he shook the ashes out of his pipe and leaned forward with a
solemn face. “I’ll admit the truth to you, Davie. I’m black afraid.”
He looked so earnest and serious sitting there with his short-sighted
eyes peering at me that I could not help being impressed.
“Whatever is the matter?” I asked. “Has anything happened?”
He shook his head. “Nothing I can put a name to. But I have a
presentiment that some mischief is afoot in these hills. I feel it in
my bones.”
I confess I was startled by these words. You must remember that I had
never given a hint of my suspicions to Mr Wardlaw beyond asking him if
a wizard lived in the neighbourhood—a question anybody might have put.
But here was the schoolmaster discovering for himself some mystery in
Blaauwildebeestefontein.
I tried to get at his evidence, but it was very little. He thought
there were an awful lot of blacks about. “The woods are full of them,”
he said. I gathered he did not imagine he was being spied on, but
merely felt that there were more natives about than could be explained.
“There’s another thing,” he said. “The native bairns have all left the
school. I’ve only three scholars left, and they are from Dutch farms. I
went to Majinje to find out what was up, and an old crone told me the
place was full of bad men. I tell you, Davie, there’s something
brewing, and that something is not good for us.”
There was nothing new to me in what Wardlaw had to tell, and yet that
talk late at night by a dying fire made me feel afraid for the second
time since I had come to Blaauwildebeestefontein. I had a clue and had
been on the look-out for mysteries, but that another should feel the
strangeness for himself made it seem desperately real to me. Of course
I scoffed at Mr Wardlaw’s fears. I could not have him spoiling all my
plans by crying up a native rising for which he had not a scrap of
evidence.
“Have you been writing to anybody?” I asked him.
He said that he had told no one, but he meant to, unless things got
better. “I haven’t the nerve for this job, Davie,” he said; “I’ll have
to resign. And it’s a pity, for the place suits my health fine. You see
I know too much, and I haven’t your whinstone nerve and total lack of
imagination.”
I told him that it was simply fancy, and came from reading too many
books and taking too little exercise. But I made him promise to say
nothing to anybody either by word of mouth or letter, without telling
me first. Then I made him a rummer of toddy and sent him to bed a
trifle comforted.
The first thing I did in my new room was to shift the bed into the
corner out of line with the window. There were no shutters, so I put up
an old table-top and jammed it between the window frames. Also, I
loaded my shot-gun and kept it by my bedside. Had Wardlaw seen these
preparations he might have thought more of my imagination and less of
my nerve. It was a real comfort to me to put out a hand in the darkness
and feel Colin’s shaggy coat.