From sketch-book and diary Part 5

Here I must interpolate the statement of certain facts which will enable you more fully to sympathise with me in the catastrophe that closes this mid-ocean episode.

You must know that white servants are impossible to find at the Cape, and one must bring all one's staff out with one, "for better, for worse," it may be for three, four, five years. If any turn out badly, it is true you may send them home, but--who is to replace them? I could not persuade my cook at Dover Castle to undertake this expatriation, her courage failing her at the last moment, and I had to find an untried subst.i.tute. She was a Dane with the blood of generations of bellicose Vikings coursing through her veins, and I had watched her daily on the other deck from afar with apprehensions.

"The ball is over and I feel decidedly limp. I thought I was going to have a pleasant evening. I was sitting with Lady ---- and all the others who were not masquerading, enjoying the sight of the figures in all kinds of extempore costumes appearing on the deck from below and mustering prior to setting to, the band playing a spirited waltz, when there slowly emerged from the saloon stairway, as though rising from the waves she rules--Britannia! First a high bra.s.s helmet with scarlet crest, then a trident held in one hand, a shield in the other, and the folds of the Union Jack draping her commanding form. She stepped on deck. 'I say,' said a voice, 'this is _the_ success of the evening; who is it?' 'Who is it?' you heard on every side. 'Who is it?' asked Lady ---- turning to me. 'My cook,' I faintly answered. The last speaker knew her South Africa, and all the possibilities of the future might have spoken in my face to judge by the choking laughter that caused her precipitate withdrawal. Each time she ventured back within sight of my smileless face the fit seized her again. Later on I saw Britannia dancing in a small set of Lancers hand in hand with the Marchioness.

Shall I ever get her harnessed now?"

I went back to hang over the bulwarks and lose myself among the stars.

And so we made our way athwart the world. Each evening every one went to scan the chart where the little "atom's" progress was marked with, to us, an all too short pen-stroke, showing the distance covered in the last twenty-four hours. And in time the sad South Atlantic broke up the exquisite blue weather of the Tropics.

The diary goes on: "To-night we saw the Pole Star set for the last time.

A profound melancholy--a sense of losing a life-companion--falls on the mind. The child who has just seen its old nurse turn a bend in the road and disappear looks with rueful eyes on the bright newcomer. The Southern Cross and all the new stars will never fill the void left by the constellations which I have watched above the beloved scenes of the Northern World. My thoughts follow the Pole Star beyond the dark rim of the horizon. Dear old friend! I shall not feel content, no matter how beautiful I shall find the Southern heavens, till the joyful night when the captain of the Homeward Bound tells us we shall see thee rise. When will that be--in two--in three--years?"

I spoke just now of the "sad" South Atlantic. To me it will always be the saddest part of the world. The sky above it loses the transparent and radiant quality of blue ("less blue than radiant," Mrs. Browning happily says of the Florentine sky) and takes more of a cobalt quality, and the tone of the sea follows suit. The effect of the diminishing warmth also chills one morally and physically, and one knows that the best is pa.s.sed. The phrase, "a waste of waters," comes constantly to the mind.

The following extract from the diary will show how this mournful sentiment of the South Atlantic was one day accentuated--stamped, as it were, with the seal of sorrow, on our return voyage, four days from Cape Town. "We had a burial at sea, the forlornest thing I have ever witnessed. A poor consumptive governess, travelling alone, died last night, who must have been far too ill to be put on board ship. She was buried at eleven this morning.

"We were kneeling near the body, which lay on a bier shaped like a tray, covered with the Union Jack, at the open gangway overhanging the dreary tossing waters. Not a glimpse of blue sky above, the dense clouds shut it out. As she belonged to our Church, W., in uniform, read the prayers and Captain C. the responses. When the prayers were ended the bier was tilted by the six sailors who had been grasping it all through the service. The poor little body, sewn up in sacking, darted out, with a rattle of the leaden weights, from under the covering flag and fell with a loud splash into the black ocean; the flowers that had been placed on it scattered on the foam, and, as the ship scarcely stopped, these were soon left behind to sink and disappear. He who read the prayers said to me when all was over, 'Christ walks the waters as well as the land.'"

Two days after I read: "A concert this evening, with some comic songs. I noticed the piano was draped with the same Union Jack that covered the poor girl two days ago."

One can hardly realize what a sailing voyage of this magnitude must have been in the old days. Our modern impatience can hardly endure the thought. The announcement one evening that at dawn we should sight Table Mountain was extremely pleasant. The arrival had the never-fading charm.

"I see papa!" sang out little M. "How are the children?" hailed papa from the quay. "All well!" And we land on utterly new ground to begin a new experience. A short train journey, turning the flank of Table Mountain, brings us to our new home at Rosebank, where I find a pair of shapely Cape ponies harnessed to the Victoria awaiting us at the station.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CORNER OF OUR GARDEN AT ROSEBANK]

CHAPTER II

AT ROSEBANK, CAPE COLONY

"Strange land; strange birds with startling cries; strange flowers; strange scents! I received a bouquet of welcome on my arrival composed of gra.s.s-green flowers with brilliant rose-coloured leaves. Where am I?

_Where_ are the points of the compa.s.s?

"I was watching the sun travelling to his setting this evening, and, forgetting I was perforce facing North to watch him, he seemed to be sloping down towards the East! And lo! when he was gone, the crescent moon on the wrong side of the sunset and turned the wrong way. And a cold south wind bringing melancholy messages from the Antarctic. 'There has been a storm in the south,' some one said, and the words struck drearily on my mind's ear.

"My Bible, so full of imagery taken from the aspects of Nature, is turned inside out.

Arise (depart), north wind; and come, O south wind; blow through my garden, and let the aromatical spices thereof flow (Canticles iv.

16).

"My Shakespeare is upside down.

At Christmas I no more desire a rose Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled mirth.-- _Love's Labour's Lost._

"Here roses load the Christmas air with sweetness, and May ushers in the snow upon the mountains.

When proud-pied April, dress'd in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.--_Sonnet._

"Here April is in the 'sear and yellow.'

"Yesterday a furnace-blast swooped down upon us from the great deserts to the north, and I feel I shall never be myself while I continue to see my shadow at noonday projected southward. But enough of grumbling for the present.

"Nowhere have I seen such starlight as streams upon the earth from the Milky Way, which belts the whole heavens here with silver. I don't know why I have never seen the Milky Way so distinct and splendid in the Northern Hemisphere. It is the glory of the South African nights, and I have the pleasure, too, of seeing the entire sweep of the 'Scorpion's'

tail, superb scroll of blazing stars. I knew the Southern Cross would be disappointing, and so was not disappointed.

"It gyrates over the Pole in a way to greatly astonish the uninitiated.

The other evening, dressing for an evening function, I saw it before my window upright, and on coming home in the small hours, behold it on its head!

"I cannot hope ever to convey to the mind of those who have not experienced Cape Colony the extraordinarily powerful local feeling of these days and nights. Melancholy they are--at least to me--but most, most beautiful and _pungently_ poetical. The aromatic quality of the odours that permeate the air suggests that word. Yet all is too strange to win the heart of a newcomer, however much his eyes and mind may be captivated.

"If an artist wanted to accomplish that apparently impossible feat of painting Fairyland direct from Nature, without one touch supplied out of his own fancy, he would only have to come here. There are effects of light and colour on these landscapes that I never saw elsewhere. The ordinary laws seem set aside. For instance, you expect a palm-tree to tell dark against the sunset. Oh, dear me no, not necessarily here. I saw one a tender green, and the sand about it was in a haze of softest rose-colour, through which shone the vivid orange light of the sunset behind it. Incredible altogether are the colours at sunset, but all so fleeting. And there is no after-glow here as in Egypt and Italy; the instant the glory of the setting sun is gone all is over and all is grey.

"Even the melancholy-quaint sound of the frogs through the night suggests fairy tales. It is appealing in its own way. I thought the Italian maremma frog noisy, but no one can imagine what an orgy of shrill croaking fills the nights here. They are everywhere, these irrepressibles, though invisible; near your head, far away, under your feet, at your side, in the tree-tops, in the streams, for ever springing their rattles with renewed zest. I shall never hear nocturnal frogs again without being transported to these regions of strange and melancholy nights.

"Table Mountain rises square and precipitous above our garden, far above the simmer of the frogs, and looks like an altar in the pure white light that falls upon it from the Milky Way. How still, how holy in its repose of the long ages it looks, and the thought comes to one's mind, 'Would that all the evil brought to South Africa by the finding of the gold could be gathered together and burnt on that altar as a peace offering!'

"On this Rosebank side there is nothing that jars with the majestic feeling of Table Mountain, but to see what we English have done at its base on the other side, at Cape Town, is to see what man can do in his little way to outrage Nature's dignity. The Dutch never jarred; their old farm-houses with white walls, thatched roofs, green shutters, and rounded Flemish gables look most harmonious in this landscape. Wherever we have colonized there you will see the corrugated iron dwelling, the barbed-wire fence, the loathsome advertis.e.m.e.nt. We talk so much of the love of the beautiful, and yet no people do so much to spoil beauty as we do wherever we settle down, all the world over. I respect the Dutch saying; 'The eye must have something'--beauty is a necessity to moral health. A clear sky and a far horizon have more value to the national mind than we care to recognize, and though the smoking factory that falsifies England's skies and blurs her horizons may fill our pockets with gold, it makes us poorer by dulling our natures. I am sure that a clear physical horizon induces a clear mental one.

"As you gaze, enraptured, at the rosy flush of evening on the mountains across "False Bay" from some vantage point on the road to Simon's Town, your eye is caught by staring letters in blatant colours in the foreground. "Keller's boots are the best"; "Guinea Gold Cigarettes"; "Go to the Little Dust Pan, Cape Town, for your Kitchen things." I _won't_ go to the Little Dust Pan. Of all the horrors, a dust pan at Cape Town, where your eyes are probably full enough of dust already from the arid streets, and your face stinging with the pebbles blown into it by a bitter "sou'easter"? I once said in Egypt I knew nothing more trying than paying calls in a "hamseem," but a Cape Town "sou'easter"

disarraying you, under similar circ.u.mstances, is a great deal more exasperating.

"I am told the Old Cape Town, when Johannesburg was as yet dormant, was a simple and comely place--its white houses, so well adapted to this intensely sunny climate, were deep set in wooded gardens, a few of which have so far escaped the claws of the jerry builder. (O United States, what things you send us--"jerry," "shoddy" ----!) But now the glaring streets, much too wide, and left unfinished, are lined with American "Stores" with cast-iron porticoes, above which rise buildings of most pretentious yet nondescript architecture, and the ragged outskirts present stretches of corrugated iron shanties which positively rattle back the clatter of a pa.s.sing train or tram-car. And all around lie the dust bins of the population, the battered tin can, the derelict boot. No authorities seem yet to have been established to prevent the populace, white, brown, and black, from throwing out all their old refuse where they like. Some day things may be taken in hand, but at present this half-baked civilization produces very dreadful results.

There is promise of what, some day, may be done in the pleasing red Parliament House and the beautiful public gardens of the upper town.

There is such a rush for gold, you see! No one cares for poor Cape Town _as_ a town. The adventurer is essentially a bird of pa.s.sage. Man and Nature contrast more unfavourably to the former here than elsewhere, and the lines,

Where every prospect pleases And only man is vile,

ring in my ears all day.

"Altogether our Eden here is sadly damaged, and I am sorry it should be my compatriots who are chiefly answerable for the ugly patches on so surpa.s.singly beautiful a scene. Our sophisticated life, too, is out of place in this unfinished country, and we ought to live more simply, as the Dutch do, and not feel it necessary to carry on the same _menage_ as in London. Liveried servants in tall hats and c.o.c.kades irritate me under such a sun, and the butler in his white choker makes me gasp. An extravagant London-trained cook is more than ever trying where all provisions are so absurdly dear. The native servant in his own suitable dress, as in India and Egypt, does not exist down here.

"One of the chief reasons, I find, as I settle down in my new surroundings, for the feeling of incompleteness which I experience, is the fact of this country's having no history. We get forlorn glimpses of the Past, when the old Dutch settlers used to hear the roar of the lions outside Cape Town Fort of nights; and, further back, we get such peeps as the quaint narratives of the early explorers allow us, but beyond those there is the great dark void.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE INVERTED CRESCENT]

"This is all from my own point of view, and I know there is one, an Africander born,[1] who, with strong and vivid pen, writes with sympathy of the charms of Italy, but only expands into heartfelt home-fervour when returning to the red soil and atmospheric glamour of her native veldt. This personal way of looking at things makes the value of all art, literary and pictorial, to my mind. Set two artists of equal merit to paint the same scene together; the two pictures will be quite unlike each other. I am of those who believe that picture will live longest which contains the most of the author's own thought, provided the author's thought is worthy, and the technical qualities are good, well understood."

[1] Olive Schreiner.

I will end my South African sketch by one more page of diary, which, in recording a day's expedition to the Paarl, gives an impression of the Cape landscape which may stand as typical of all its inland scenery.