The Claw Part 15

A convoy of waggons on the march can in two or three minutes be transformed into an almost impregnable _laager_. When the waggons are out-spanned it takes not more than ten to fifteen minutes to form a _laager_, bush it, and get all the horses inside.

So the men I had despised for idlers and loiterers were not so idle after all, it seemed! It is true that they had amused themselves in the afternoons and evenings, but they had been hard at it for many hours in the morning while I was still sleeping. Most of them, in fact, were not Fort George men at all, but came from camps and farms in the outlying districts, because on account of the offensive att.i.tude of the Matabele it was no longer safe to be there. They had left all their regular occupations to come into town to get ready for war. Every one who was not a trooper commanded a troop. Every one had a part and place in the Government plan for invading Matabeleland, putting an end to an impossible situation, and making the country a safe and clean one for a white race. Having newly come to Mashonaland I did not know of all these internal workings and doings. Therefore I was more surprised than any one else to see the splendidly mounted and equipped body of men who were ready to start for Matabeleland the day after the orders to march came down.

Though it was as early as four o'clock in the morning every one in the town was up to see the men leave, and I, too, at the sound of the bugle, had risen from my sleepless bed, dressed hastily, and joined the crowd round the post-office. In the crush I found myself standing next to a woman in a grey skirt and pink cotton blouse, and recognised her as that Mrs Marriott of whom the astounding story of unarrived boxes had been told. After a little while I spoke to her about the men, making one or two ordinary remarks,--what fine fellows they were, and how happy they seemed to be off,--but she had a desperate look and answered me in a dull way, like a woman who only heard dimly what was being said to her.

It occurred to me then that her husband was one of those about to ride away.

Most of the men who composed the Column had their wives and families in the place and business to attend to; in fact a great many of them were leaving behind everything they possessed in the world. Yet I never saw a merrier, jollier crowd, and the wives looked equally dauntless. Some of them had white lips but they smiled with them, and the children were prancing about everywhere, hooting with excitement. The only downcast faces to be seen were those of the men who were being left behind, our defenders, of whom Mrs Valetta had spoken so mockingly. I cast my eye round upon them. It was not true that they were the maimed and the halt and the blind, but certainly they were not the most attractive-looking men I had ever seen. Most of them wore unshaven faces and no coats, while their nether garments were what is known as. .h.i.tched around them on a leather strap--some of them frankly repeating the process of hitching while they stood scowling enviously upon the lucky men who had horses and had been p.r.o.nounced fit.

Colonel Blow had neither forgotten to shave nor to put on his collar, but the orders that had come down to him to stay at his post and look after the town of Fort George had changed him from a charming, nice man into a bear of the most unsociable kind. He looked capable of falling with fang and claw upon any one who ventured to speak to him. Among the rest of our defenders were the bearded pard, the parson, the postmaster whose genial face was also trimmed with scowls, and the doctor, whose gout prevented him from being a warrior but who frankly informed every one who was interested enough to listen that nothing would have induced him to go, gout or no gout. He was not looking for any Lobengulas, he said. _He_ had not lost any Matabele _impis_, so why should he go and search for them?

There were other odds and ends of human relics who were not for the front. I noticed one man, a tall fellow with a stoop in his broad shoulders and a ravaged face that still bore traces of rather extraordinary good looks, but his skin was a terrible yellow colour and his eyes were sunken pits in his face. He was such a striking tragedy that I could not refrain from putting a question about him to the woman at my side.

"What a splendid piece of wreckage!" I said in a low voice. "Why didn't some one save him from the rocks, I wonder? Who is he, Mrs Marriott?"

In her dull quiet voice she answered two words:

"My husband."

My face went hot with shame for my thoughtless cruelty.

"Oh, forgive me!" I stammered, remembering the tale that I had been told of the terrible tragedy of her finding after marriage that her husband was a slave to the morphia habit. I did not know what to say: the thing was so unpardonable, so irremediable. But her face showed no more than its usual expression of dull sadness.

"It doesn't matter," she replied, and continued to stare blankly before her.

At that moment my attention was wrenched away from her by the sound of a charming and musical voice. Some one was speaking--a rather short, thickset man, sitting heavily on his horse. He had a reddish face, large, bright, dark eyes, and an abnormally big forehead; and under his c.o.c.ked-up-at-one-side hat he held his head bent forward in a curiously concentrated way as he spoke to the men, who all turned to him, listening like men in a trance. He had not spoken two words before I knew the American name for this ordinary-looking man with the magnetic presence and the charming and musical woman's voice. He was a spell-binder.

"Men, I have to thank you, from Mr Rhodes, for the British South Africa Company, and for the British Empire, for the way in which you and the men all over Mashonaland have come forward to tackle this job. It is going to be a tough job--and not at all pretty--but we will stick to it, and I am confident of our ultimate success. We have right on our side.

'Thrice-armed is he who hath his quarrel just' you know and we have given Lobengula every opportunity to make good his promise to the Chartered Company, but over and over again he has betrayed our trust and broken his compact. He has crossed our boundaries, cut our telegraph wires, raided the chiefs under our protection, and lately, as you are aware, not content with wallowing in blood in his own kraals, he has been here to our very doors murdering the wretched natives who as our servants for the first time in their lives knew the sweet taste of liberty that is the right of every man that breathes. It has come to this--that our women and children are in danger; our mining and agricultural interests, dearly bought by fever and privation, are threatened; none of us can ever be safe away on a lonely farm or mine; we have proved the treachery of Lobengula, and we know that his people mean mischief. Well, it has got to end! We must either once and for all put down the power of the Matabele, or get out. I don't think we mean to get out. This is too good a country to leave--and we have paid too dearly for our share in it. It is too fine a country to be nothing but the shambles of a b.l.o.o.d.y butcher; this wide, lovely land calls for some n.o.bler destiny than to be the necropolis of the wretched Mashona nation. It is a white man's country--a fit heritage for the children of British men and women--_your_ children, and the children of the women who have not disdained to come up here and feel the rough edge of life; who do not grudge their men to the service of the Empire; who are here this morning not to weep, but to cheer you forth to victory. Goodbye, boys! I'll meet you again at Buluwayo. In the name of Cecil Rhodes I give you G.o.dspeed!"

He took the hat from his fine head and waved it to them smiling, then swiftly turned his horse's head and rode away followed by his staff, amidst wild bursts of cheering.

A moment later, the children had broken into wild hurrahs, whips were cracking, and waggons streaking down the road in clouds of dust. Every one was waving hands and handkerchiefs to the men who rode away laughing in the morning sunshine.

"We cheered them forth, Brilliant and gallant and brave."

When all was over I saw Mrs Marriott walking listlessly away in the wake of her husband, who, now that the last groups were breaking up, had turned and was going towards his home. Some one near me remarked:

"It is too bad about poor Marriott--he almost begged on his knees to go, but Fitzgerald didn't make any bones about telling him he would be no good. Of course it was quite true, but it doubled Marriott up like a knife between the ribs. I didn't think he could feel like that still.

Fitz might have been a little tenderer about it."

The doctor slapped the speaker on the shoulders.

"My boy, there is nothing tender about war. That is why I am staying at home."

CHAPTER EIGHT.

FAITH CALLS.

"We cannot grieve as they that have no hope."

A cloud of dark and brooding melancholy settled upon Fort George after the departure of the troops. The streets were silent. Many of the huts had their doors padlocked and rough plank shutters nailed over the windows. Never the familiar sound of a native voice was heard, nor the clatter of a horse's hoof on the roads. The place had an indescribable air of loneliness and desertion. The men who were left behind were busy all day helping to build sand-bag barricades in front of the post-office, which was to be turned into a fort for our safety in case the town should be attacked later on if the fighting went against our men. All the Mashona boys had run away to their kraals, and there were no domestics or boys for public work, so the convicts, who were mostly Cape natives, were let out under a strong guard of white men and told off in gangs to do the work of digging earth to fill the sand-bags.

The Fort George women who had their homes and their children to mind were busier than ever, having no servants; but the wretched Salisbury women, of whom whether I liked it or not I was obliged to consider myself part and parcel, had nothing whatsoever to do from morning to night. Fortunately or unfortunately for us, Mrs Brand in giving Judy a seat in her cart had been obliged to leave her Cape maid Adriana behind, and she had given the woman instructions to divide her services amongst us. On this account we did not feel the loss of servants much, but perhaps it might have been better if we had had something to do, even housework, for a more wretched quartette of idle people it would have been hard to find anywhere. Three of us at least had a secret that we desperately desired to hide from the others, and the fourth--Mrs Skeffington-Smythe--was quite the most maliciously curious woman ever born.

Adriana, a big bustling creature well able to do the work of our small household, came and cooked in our kitchen and served the meals for all four of us in our little hut, and so there we were, everlastingly together, Mrs Valetta and I rarely speaking to each other, and Miss Cleeve and her friend always on the verge of a quarrel.

The latter two professed a great and eternal attachment to each other, but Mrs Valetta disposed of their friendship thus:

"Mrs Skeffy and Anna Cleeve make me tired. They simply stick together because they know so much about each other they daren't quarrel, but a quarrel is bound to come one of these days and then their secrets will be flying about all over the place and we'll have something to amuse us.

Anna. Cleeve is far too clever a girl not to tire of Mrs Skeffington-Smythe, who is the silliest woman I have ever met. She thinks of nothing all day but polishing her nails and soaking her soul in Swinburne."

It usually rained heavily all the mornings and cleared up in the afternoons, and the first time we went round to the tennis-court in desperation for something to do we found that every sign of the markings had been washed away. No one had the heart to paint them on again even if the brush and whitewash could have been discovered, so we left it as we found it with the wind sweeping leaves and pieces of stick and paper across it and turning it into the most desolate spot in the town. We went home again and sat sullenly round the tea-table--four idle, wretched women! And I believed myself to be the most wretched of all.

I don't know how I bore the pa.s.sing of the days. My heart was "a thing of stone in a valley lone." To the pain of the blow Judy had dealt me, which still benumbed my spirit, was added the strain of waiting for Anthony Kinsella's return from Linkwater. My tongue did me the service of saying all the everyday necessary things, and I ate and took part in life like the rest of them, but I could not sleep and I could not think, and it seemed to me that life would never be the same again.

"I could never again be friends with the roses-- I should hate sweet music."

I found myself listening to a conversation about Mrs Geach, which reminded me of nothing so much as an attack by three savage Indian squaws on some helpless victim fastened to the stake. It transpired that no one had seen her since the day before the departure of the Column, and though every one turned their eyes away from her in the street, or looked through her as if die were a spirit, here were three people very much annoyed because she now preferred to stay indoors and not be seen. The most charitable thing to be heard was a remark of Anna Cleeve's:

"Poor wretch! Life can't be very interesting for her now George Rookwood has gone."

"What can she expect?" said Mrs Skeffington-Smythe with an air of the utmost virtue. "If a woman deliberately runs off the rails she must expect a smash-up."

"The smash-up is not the worst part of it, I imagine," remarked Mrs Valetta. "No doubt there is plenty of compensating excitement about _that_. It is in the cold grey years that come after that the full tale of misery is told. However, I don't think she has reached that point yet."

"No, wait; some day George Rookwood will meet a girl and fall in love."

Mrs Skeffington-Smythe spoke in a pleasant gentle tone and her eyes took on the rapt look of one contemplating the tenderest kind of romance. Just about this time the doctor paid his daily visit, and one of his items of news concerned Mrs Rookwood. The men were charitable enough not to grudge her the name of the man for whom she had staked her all on the great chess-board of life.

"As no one had seen anything of her since the departure of Rookwood,"

said Dr Abingdon, "and the house showed no sign of being occupied, Blow thought it his business to call there this morning, and when he couldn't make any one hear he proceeded to break in, and--what do you think?"

Every one had put on a frozen face at the first mention of Mrs Rookwood, giving the doctor to understand that they considered it insufferable impertinence on his part to speak of such a person in their presence at all; but at his dramatic pause curiosity could not be restrained.

"Well? What?" said Miss Cleeve.

"Has she committed suicide?" cried Mrs Skeffington-Smythe.

Mrs Valetta had the decency to curl her lip at them.

"Not at all," chuckled the doctor, delighted with his effect. "She's simply _not there_. Everything was found in tip-top order, and a note on the table addressed to Blow telling him not to bother or make any search as she was perfectly all right but had made up her mind to go on a journey. What do you think of that?"

"But where can she be gone to?"

"That's the question! No one saw her go, but it now turns out that her horse was not commandeered because Rookwood reported that it had a sore foot. Well, sore foot or no sore foot it's gone, and she's gone with it."

"Well, she's both clever and lucky to be out of this desolate hole,"

commented Mrs Valetta.

And she was right. For us the days grew greyer, emptier, and more forlorn. Walks outside the town were forbidden by the Commandant, who was Colonel Blow grown unrecognisably cross and surly. There were no walks inside the town except from house to house, and as we had never been on calling terms with the Fort George women there were no houses for us to go to.