I heard a slipping and clatter of pebbles near me, and discovered Fred
Maxim at my side. "Look!" he said, hoarse with excitement. "Already!" He
pointed to a string of dim little figures galloping helter-skelter over
the neck and down the gap in the hills towards us.
They came up against the pale western sky, little nodding swaying black
dots, and flashed over and were lost in the misty purple groove towards
us. They must have been riding through the night--the British following.
To them we were invisible. Behind us was the shining east, we were in a
shadow still too dark to betray us.
In a moment I was afoot and called out to the men, my philosophy, my
deep questionings, all torn out of my mind like a page of scribbled
poetry plucked out of a business note-book. Khaki figures were up all
about me passing the word and hurrying to their places. All the
dispositions I had made overnight came back clear and sharp into my
mind. We hadn't long for preparations....
It seems now there were only a few busy moments before the fighting
began. It must have been much longer in reality. By that time we had
seen their gun come over and a train of carts. They were blundering
right into us. Every moment it was getting lighter, and the moment of
contact nearer. Then "Crack!" from down below among the rocks, and there
was a sudden stoppage of the trail of dark shapes upon the hillside.
"Crack!" came a shot from our extreme left. I damned the impatient men
who had shot away the secret of our presence. But we had to keep them at
a shooting distance. Would the Boers have the wit to charge through us
before the daylight came, or should we hold them? I had a swift,
disturbing idea. Would they try a bolt across our front to the left? Had
we extended far enough across the deep valley to our left? But they'd
hesitate on account of their gun. The gun couldn't go that way because
of the gullies and thickets.... But suppose they tried it! I hung
between momentous decisions....
Then all up the dim hillside I could make out the Boers halting and
riding back. One rifle across there flashed.
We held them!...
We had begun the fight of Pieters Nek which ended before midday with the
surrender of Simon Botha and over seven hundred men. It was the crown of
all my soldiering.
§ 4
I came back to England at last when I was twenty-six. After the peace of
Vereeniging I worked under the Repatriation Commission which controlled
the distribution of returning prisoners and concentrated population to
their homes; for the most part I was distributing stock and grain, and
presently manoeuvring a sort of ploughing flying column that the dearth
of horses and oxen made necessary, work that was certainly as hard as if
far less exciting than war. That particular work of replanting the
desolated country with human beings took hold of my imagination, and for
a time at least seemed quite straightforward and understandable. The
comfort of ceasing to destroy!
No one has written anything that really conveys the quality of that
repatriation process; the queer business of bringing these suspicious,
illiterate, despondent people back to their desolated homes, reuniting
swarthy fathers and stockish mothers, witnessing their touchingly
inexpressive encounters, doing what one could to put heart into their
resumption. Memories come back to me of great littered heaps of luggage,
bundles, blankets, rough boxes, piled newly purchased stores, ready-made
doors, window sashes heaped ready for the waggons, slow-moving,
apathetic figures sitting and eating, an infernal squawking of parrots,
sometimes a wailing of babies. Repatriation went on to a parrot
obligato, and I never hear a parrot squawk without a flash of South
Africa across my mind. All the prisoners, I believe, brought back
parrots--some two or three. I had to spread these people out, over a
country still grassless, with teams of war-worn oxen, mules and horses
that died by the dozen on my hands. The end of each individual instance
was a handshake, and one went lumbering on, leaving the children one had
deposited behind one already playing with old ration-tins or hunting
about for cartridge-cases, while adults stared at the work they had to
do.
There was something elementary in all that redistribution. I felt at
times like a child playing in a nursery and putting out its bricks and
soldiers on the floor. There was a kind of greatness too about the
process, a quality of atonement. And the people I was taking back, the
men anyhow, were for the most part charming and wonderful people, very
simple and emotional, so that once a big bearded man, when I wanted him
in the face of an overflowing waggon to abandon about half-a-dozen great
angular colored West Indian shells he had lugged with him from Bermuda,
burst into tears of disappointment. I let him take them, and at the end
I saw them placed with joy and reverence in a little parlor, to become
the war heirlooms no doubt of a long and bearded family. As we shook
hands after our parting coffee he glanced at them with something between
gratitude and triumph in his eyes.
Yes, that was a great work, more especially for a ripening youngster
such as I was at that time. The memory of long rides and tramps over
that limitless veld returns to me, lonely in spite of the creaking,
lumbering waggons and transport riders and Kaffirs that followed behind.
South Africa is a country not only of immense spaces but of an immense
spaciousness. Everything is far apart; even the grass blades are far
apart. Sometimes one crossed wide stony wastes, sometimes came great
stretches of tall, yellow-green grass, wheel-high, sometimes a little
green patch of returning cultivation drew nearer for an hour or so,
sometimes the blundering, toilsome passage of a torrent interrupted our
slow onward march. And constantly one saw long lines of torn and twisted
barbed wire stretching away and away, and here and there one found
archipelagoes as it were in this dry ocean of the skeletons of cattle,
and there were places where troops had halted and their scattered
ration-tins shone like diamonds in the sunshine. Occasionally I struck
talk, some returning prisoner, some group of discharged British soldiers
become carpenters or bricklayers again and making their pound a day by
the work of rebuilding; always everyone was ready to expatiate upon the
situation. Usually, however, I was alone, thinking over this immense now
vanished tornado of a war and this equally astonishing work of healing
that was following it.
I became keenly interested in all this great business, and thought at
first of remaining indefinitely in Africa. Repatriation was presently
done and finished. I had won Milner's good opinion, and he was anxious
for me to go on working in relation to the labor difficulty that rose
now more and more into prominence behind the agricultural re-settlement.
But when I faced that I found myself in the middle of a tangle
infinitely less simple than putting back an agricultural population upon
its land.
§ 5
For the first time in my life I was really looking at the social
fundamental of Labor.
There is something astonishingly naïve in the unconsciousness with which
people of our class float over the great economic realities. All my life
I had been hearing of the Working Classes, of Industrialism, of Labor
Problems and the Organization of Labor; but it was only now in South
Africa, in this chaotic, crude illuminating period of putting a smashed
and desolated social order together again, that I perceived these
familiar phrases represented something--something stupendously real.
There were, I began to recognize, two sides to civilization; one
traditional, immemorial, universal, the side of the homestead, the side
I had been seeing and restoring; and there was another, ancient, too,
but never universal, as old at least as the mines of Syracuse and the
building of the pyramids, the side that came into view when I emerged
from the dusty station and sighted the squat shanties and slender
chimneys of Johannesburg, that uprooted side of social life, that
accumulation of toilers divorced from the soil, which is Industrialism
and Labor and which carries such people as ourselves, and whatever
significance and possibilities we have, as an elephant carries its
rider.
Now all Johannesburg and Pretoria were discussing Labor and nothing but
Labor. Bloemfontein was in conference thereon. Our work of repatriation
which had loomed so large on the southernward veld became here a
business at once incidental and remote. One felt that a little sooner or
a little later all that would resume and go on, as the rains would, and
the veld-grass. But this was something less kindred to the succession of
the seasons and the soil. This was a hitch in the upper fabric. Here in
the great ugly mine-scarred basin of the Rand, with its bare hillsides,
half the stamps were standing idle, machinery was eating its head off,
time and water were running to waste amidst an immense exasperated
disputation. Something had given way. The war had spoilt the Kaffir
"boy," he was demanding enormous wages, he was away from Johannesburg,
and above all, he would no longer "go underground."
Implicit in all the argument and suggestion about me was this profoundly
suggestive fact that some people, quite a lot of people, scores of
thousands, had to "go underground." Implicit too always in the discourse
was the assumption that the talker or writer in question wasn't for a
moment to be expected to go there. Those others, whoever they were, had
to do that for us. Before the war it had been the artless Portuguese
Kaffir, but he alas! was being diverted to open-air employment at
Delagoa Bay. Should we raise wages and go on with the fatal process of
"spoiling the workers," should we by imposing a tremendous hut-tax drive
the Kaffir into our toils, should we carry the labor hunt across the
Zambesi into Central Africa, should we follow the lead of Lord Kitchener
and Mr. Creswell and employ the rather dangerous unskilled white labor
(with "ideas" about strikes and socialism) that had drifted into
Johannesburg, should we do tremendous things with labor-saving
machinery, or were we indeed (desperate yet tempting resort!) to bring
in the cheap Indian or Chinese coolie?
Steadily things were drifting towards that last tremendous experiment.
There was a vigorous opposition in South Africa and in England (growing
there to an outcry), but behind that proposal was the one vitalizing
conviction in modern initiative:--indisputably it would pay, _it would
pay_!...
The human mind has a much more complex and fluctuating process than most
of those explanatory people who write about psychology would have us
believe. Instead of that simple, direct movement, like the movement of a
point, forward and from here to there, one's thoughts advance like an
army, sometimes extended over an enormous front, sometimes in échelon,
sometimes bunched in a column throwing out skirmishing clouds of
emotion, some flying and soaring, some crawling, some stopping and
dying.... In this matter of Labor, for example, I have thought so much,
thought over the ground again and again, come into it from this way and
from that way, that for the life of me I find it impossible to state at
all clearly how much I made of these questions during that Johannesburg
time. I cannot get back into those ancient ignorances, revive my old
astonishments and discoveries. Certainly I envisaged the whole process
much less clearly than I do now, ignored difficulties that have since
entangled me, regarded with a tremendous perplexity aspects that have
now become lucidly plain. I came back to England confused, and doing
what confused people are apt to do, clinging to an inadequate phrase
that seemed at any rate to define a course of action. The word
"efficiency" had got hold of me. All our troubles came, one assumed,
from being "inefficient." One turned towards politics with a bustling
air, and was all for fault-finding and renovation.
I sit here at my desk, pen in hand, and trace figures on the
blotting-paper, and wonder how much I understood at that time. I came
back to England to work on the side of "efficiency," that is quite
certain. A little later I was writing articles and letters about it, so
that much is documented. But I think I must have apprehended too by that
time some vague outline at least of those wider issues in the sæcular
conflict between the new forms of human association and the old, to
which contemporary politics and our national fate are no more than
transitory eddies and rufflings of the surface waters. It was all so
nakedly plain there. On the one hand was the primordial, on the other
the rankly new. The farm on the veld stood on the veld, a thing of the
veld, a thing rooted and established there and nowhere else. The dusty,
crude, brick-field desolation of the Rand on the other hand did not
really belong with any particularity to South Africa at all. It was one
with our camps and armies. It was part of something else, something
still bigger: a monstrous shadowy arm had thrust out from Europe and
torn open this country, erected these chimneys, piled these heaps--and
sent the ration-tins and cartridge-cases to follow them. It was gigantic
kindred with that ancient predecessor which had built the walls of
Zimbabwe. And this hungry, impatient demand for myriads of toilers, this
threatening inundation of black or brown or yellow bond-serfs was just
the natural voice of this colossal system to which I belonged, which had
brought me hither, and which I now perceived I did not even begin to
understand....
One day when asking my way to some forgotten destination, I had pointed
out to me the Grey and Roberts Deep Mine. Some familiarity in the name
set me thinking until I recalled that this was the mine in which I had
once heard Lady Ladislaw confess large holdings, this mine in which
gangs of indentured Chinamen would presently be sweating to pay the
wages of the game-keepers and roadmenders in Burnmore Park....
Yes, this was what I was taking in at that time, but it found
me--inexpressive; what I was saying on my return to England gave me no
intimation of the broad conceptions growing in my mind. I came back to
be one of the many scores of energetic and ambitious young men who were
parroting "Efficiency," stirring up people and more particularly
stirring up themselves with the utmost vigor,--and all the time within
their secret hearts more than a little at a loss....
§ 6
While I had been in South Africa circumstances had conspired to alter my
prospects in life very greatly. Unanticipated freedoms and opportunities
had come to me, and it was no longer out of the question for me to think
of a parliamentary career. Our fortunes had altered. My father had
ceased to be rector of Burnmore, and had become a comparatively wealthy
man.
My second cousin, Reginald Stratton, had been drowned in Finland, and
his father had only survived the shock of his death a fortnight; his
sister, Arthur Mason's first wife, had died in giving birth to a
stillborn child the year before, and my father found himself suddenly
the owner of all that large stretch of developing downland and building
land which old Reginald had bought between Shaddock and Golding on the
south and West Esher station on the north, and in addition of
considerable investments in northern industrials. It was an odd
collusion of mortality; we had had only the coldest relations with our
cousins, and now abruptly through their commercial and speculative
activities, which we had always affected to despise and ignore, I was in
a position to attempt the realization of my old political ambitions.
My cousins' house had not been to my father's taste. He had let it, and
I came to a new home in a pleasant, plain red-brick house, a hundred and
fifty years old perhaps, on an open and sunny hillside, sheltered by
trees eastward and northward, a few miles to the south-west of
Guildford. It had all the gracious proportions, the dignified
simplicity, the roomy comfort of the good building of that time. It
looked sunward; we breakfasted in sunshine in the library, and outside
was an old wall with peach trees and a row of pillar roses heavily in
flower. I had a little feared this place; Burnmore Rectory had been so
absolutely home to me with its quiet serenities, its ample familiar
garden, its greenhouses and intimately known corners, but I perceived I
might have trusted my father's character to preserve his essential
atmosphere. He was so much himself as I remembered him that I did not
even observe for a day or so that he had not only aged considerably but
discarded the last vestiges of clerical costume in his attire. He met me
in front of the house and led me into a wide panelled hall and wrung my
hand again and again, deeply moved and very inexpressive. "Did you have
a good journey?" he asked again and again, with tears in his eyes. "Did
you have a comfortable journey?"
"I've not seen the house," said I. "It looks fine."
"_You're_ a man," he said, and patted my shoulder. "Of course! It was at
Burnmore."
"You're not changed," I said. "You're not an atom changed."
"How could I?" he replied. "Come--come and have something to eat. You
ought to have something to eat."
We talked of the house and what a good house it was, and he took me out
into the garden to see the peaches and grape vine and then brought me
back without showing them to me in order to greet my cousin. "It's very
like Burnmore," he said with his eyes devouring me, "very like. A
little more space and--no services. No services at all. That makes a gap
of course. There's a little chap about here, you'll find--his name is
Wednesday--who sorts my papers and calls himself my secretary.... Not
necessary perhaps but--_I missed the curate_."
He said he was reading more than he used to do now that the parish was
off his hands, and he was preparing material for a book. It was, he
explained later, to take the form of a huge essay ostensibly on Secular
Canons, but its purport was to be no less than the complete
secularization of the Church of England. At first he wanted merely to
throw open the cathedral chapters to distinguished laymen, irrespective
of their theological opinions, and to make each English cathedral a
centre of intellectual activity, a college as it were of philosophers
and writers. But afterwards his suggestions grew bolder, the Articles of
Religion were to be set aside, the creeds made optional even for the
clergy. His dream became more and more richly picturesque until at last
he saw Canterbury a realized Thelema, and St. Paul's a new Academic
Grove. He was to work at that remarkable proposal intermittently for
many years, and to leave it at last no more than a shapeless mass of
memoranda, fragmentary essays, and selected passages for quotation. Yet
mere patchwork and scrapbook as it would be, I still have some thought
of publishing it. There is a large human charity about it, a sun too
broad and warm, a reasonableness too wide and free perhaps for the timid
convulsive quality of our time, yet all good as good wine for the wise.
Is it incredible that a day should come when our great grey monuments to
the Norman spirit should cease to be occupied by narrow-witted parsons
and besieged by narrow-souled dissenters, the soul of our race in exile
from the home and place our fathers built for it?...
If he was not perceptibly changed, I thought my cousin Jane had become
more than a little sharper and stiffer. She did not like my uncle's own
personal secularization, and still less the glimpses she got of the
ampler intentions of his book. She missed the proximity to the church
and her parochial authority. But she was always a silent woman, and made
her comments with her profile and not with her tongue....
"I'm glad you've come back, Stephen," said my father as we sat together
after dinner and her departure, with port and tall silver candlesticks
and shining mahogany between us. "I've missed you. I've done my best to
follow things out there. I've got, I suppose, every press mention
there's been of you during the war and since. I've subscribed to two
press-cutting agencies, so that if one missed you the other fellow got
you. Perhaps you'll like to read them over one of these days.... You
see, there's not been a soldier in the family since the Peninsular War,
and so I've been particularly interested.... You must tell me all the
things you're thinking of, and what you mean to do. This last
stuff--this Chinese business--it puzzles me. I want to know what you
think of it--and everything."
I did my best to give him my ideas such as they were. And as they were
still very vague ideas I have no doubt he found me rhetorical. I can
imagine myself talking of the White Man's Burthen, and how in Africa it
had seemed at first to sit rather staggeringly upon our under-trained
shoulders. I spoke of slackness and planlessness.
"I've come back in search of efficiency." I have no doubt I said that
at any rate.
"We're trying to run this big empire," I may have explained, "with
under-trained, under-educated, poor-spirited stuff, and we shall come a
cropper unless we raise our quality. I'm still Imperialist, more than
ever I was. But I'm an Imperialist on a different footing. I've no great
illusions left about the Superiority of the Anglo-Saxons. All that has
gone. But I do think it will be a monstrous waste, a disaster to human
possibilities if this great liberal-spirited empire sprawls itself
asunder for the want of a little gravity and purpose. And it's here the
work has to be done, the work of training and bracing up and stimulating
the public imagination...."
Yes, that would be the sort of thing I should have said in those days.
There's an old _National Review_ on my desk as I write, containing an
article by me with some of those very phrases in it. I have been looking
at it in order to remind myself of my own forgotten eloquence.
"Yes," I remember my father saying. "Yes." And then after reflection,
"But those coolies, those Chinese coolies. You can't build up an
imperial population by importing coolies."
"I don't like that side of the business myself," I said. "It's detail."
"Perhaps. But the Liberals will turn you out on it next year. And then
start badgering public houses and looting the church.... And then this
Tariff talk! Everybody on our side seems to be mixing up the unity of
the empire with tariffs. It's a pity. Salisbury wouldn't have stood it.
Unity! Unity depends on a common literature and a common language and
common ideas and sympathies. It doesn't unite people for them to be
forced to trade with each other. Trading isn't friendship. I don't trade
with my friends and I don't make friends with my tradesmen. Natural
enemies--polite of course but antagonists. Are you keen over this Tariff
stuff, Steve?"
"Not a bit," I said. "That too seems a detail."
"It doesn't seem to be keeping its place as a detail," said my father.
"Very few men can touch tariffs and not get a little soiled. I hate all
this international sharping, all these attempts to get artificial
advantages, all this making poor people buy inferior goods dear, in the
name of the flag. If it comes to that, damn the flag! Custom-houses are
ugly things, Stephen; the dirty side of nationality. Dirty things,
ignoble, cross, cunning things.... They wake you up in the small hours
and rout over your bags.... An imperial people ought to be an urbane
people, a civilizing people--above such petty irritating things. I'd as
soon put barbed wire along the footpath across that field where the
village children go to school. Or claim that our mushrooms are
cultivated. Or prosecute a Sunday-Society Cockney for picking my
primroses. Custom-houses indeed! It's Chinese. There are things a Great
Country mustn't do, Stephen. A country like ours ought to get along
without the manners of a hard-breathing competitive cad.... If it can't
I'd rather it didn't get along.... What's the good of a huckster
country?--it's like having a wife on the streets. It's no excuse that
she brings you money. But since the peace, and that man Chamberlain's
visit to Africa, you Imperialists seem to have got this nasty spirit all
over you.... The Germans do it, you say!"
My father shut one eye and regarded the color of his port against the
waning light. "Let _'em_," he said.... "Fancy!--quoting the _Germans_!
When I was a boy, there weren't any Germans. They came up after '70.
Statecraft from Germany! And statesmen from Birmingham! German silver
and Electroplated Empires.... No."
"It's just a part of our narrow outlook," I answered from the hearthrug,
after a pause. "It's because we're so--limited that everyone is
translating the greatness of empire into preferential trading and
jealousy of Germany. It's for something bigger than that that I've
returned."
"Those big things come slowly," said my father. And then with a sigh:
"Age after age. They seem at times--to be standing still. Good things go
with the bad; bad things come with the good...."