Traffics and Discoveries Part 17

"Khaki," said the young man, sitting down in his turn, "you are a shade better than your mates. You did not make much more noise than a yoke of oxen when you tried to come up this hill, but you are an ignorant diseased beast like the rest of your people--eh? When you were at the Ragged Schools did they teach you any history, Tommy--'istory I mean?"

"Don't need no schoolin' to know a renegid," said Copper. He had made three yards down the hill--out of sight, unless they could see through rocks, of the enemy's smoking party.

The young man laughed; and tossed the soldier a black sweating stick of "True Affection." (Private Copper had not smoked a pipe for three weeks.)

"_You_ don't get this--eh?" said the young man. "_We_ do. We take it from the trains as we want it. You can keep the cake--you po-ah Tommee." Copper rammed the good stuff into his long-cold pipe and puffed luxuriously. Two years ago the sister of gunner-guard De Souza, East India Railway, had, at a dance given by the sergeants to the Allahabad Railway Volunteers, informed Copper that she could not think of waltzing with "a poo-ah Tommee." Private Copper wondered why that memory should have returned at this hour.

"I'm going to waste a little trouble on you before I send you back to your picket _quite_ naked--eh? Then you can say how you were overpowered by twenty of us and fired off your last round--like the men we picked up at the drift playing cards at Stryden's farm--eh? What's your name--eh?"

Private Copper thought for a moment of a far-away housemaid who might still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth.

"Pennycuik," he said, "John Pennycuik."

"Thank you. Well, Mr. John Pennycuik, I'm going to teach you a little 'istory, as you'd call it--eh?"

"'Ow!" said Copper, stuffing his left hand in his mouth. "So long since I've smoked I've burned my 'and--an' the pipe's dropped too. No objection to my movin' down to fetch it, is there--Sir?"

"I've got you covered," said the young man, graciously, and Private Copper, hopping on one leg, because of his sprain, recovered the pipe yet another three yards downhill and squatted under another rock slightly larger than the first. A roundish boulder made a pleasant rest for his captor, who sat cross-legged once more, facing Copper, his rifle across his knee, his hand on the trigger-guard.

"Well, Mr. Pennycuik, as I was going to tell you. A little after you were born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country, England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal would belong to England. Did you ever hear that, khaki--eh?"

"Oh no, Sir," said Copper. This sentence about the sun and the rivers happened to be a very aged jest of McBride, the professional humorist of D Company, when they discussed the probable length of the war. Copper had thrown beef-tins at McBride in the grey dawn of many wet and dry camps for intoning it.

"_Of_ course you would not. Now, mann, I tell you, listen." He spat aside and cleared his throat. "Because of that little promise, my father he moved into the Transvaal and bought a farm--a little place of twenty or thirty thousand acres, don't--you--know."

The tone, in spite of the sing-song cadence fighting with the laboured parody of the English drawl, was unbearably like the young Wilmington squire's, and Copper found himself saying: "I ought to. I've 'elped burn some."

"Yes, you'll pay for that later. _And_ he opened a store."

"Ho! Shopkeeper was he?"

"The kind you call "Sir" and sweep the floor for, Pennycuik.... You see, in those days one used to believe in the British Government. My father did. _Then_ the Transvaal wiped thee earth with the English. They beat them six times running. You know _thatt_--eh?"

"Isn't what we've come 'ere for."

"_But_ my father (he knows better now) kept on believing in the English. I suppose it was the pretty talk about rivers and suns that cheated him--eh?

Anyhow, he believed in his own country. Inn his own country. _So_--you see--he was a little startled when he found himself handed over to the Transvaal as a prisoner of war. That's what it came to, Tommy--a prisoner of war. You know what that is--eh? England was too honourable and too gentlemanly to take trouble. There were no terms made for my father."

"So 'e made 'em 'imself. Useful old bird." Private Copper sliced up another pipeful and looked out across the wrinkled sea of kopjes, through which came the roar of the rushing Orange River, so unlike quiet Cuckmere.

The young man's face darkened. "I think I shall sjambok you myself when I've quite done with you. _No_, my father (he was a fool) made no terms for eight years--ninety-six months--and for every day of them the Transvaal made his life h.e.l.l for my father and--his people."

"I'm glad to hear that," said the impenitent Copper.

"Are you? You can think of it when I'm taking the skin off your back-- eh?... My father, he lost everything--everything down to his self-respect.

You don't know what _thatt_ means--eh?"

"Why?" said Copper. "I'm smokin' baccy stole by a renegid. Why wouldn't I know?"

If it came to a flogging on that hillside there might be a chance of reprisals. Of course, he might be marched to the Boer camp in the next valley and there operated upon; but Army life teaches no man to cross bridges unnecessarily.

"Yes, after eight years, my father, cheated by your b.i.t.c.h of a country, he found out who was the upper dog in South Africa."

"That's me," said Copper valiantly. "If it takes another 'alf century, it's me an' the likes of me."

"You? Heaven help you! You'll be screaming at a wagon-wheel in an hour....

Then it struck my father that he'd like to shoot the people who'd betrayed him. You--you--_you_! He told his son all about it. He told him never to trust the English. He told him to do them all the harm he could. Mann, I tell you, I don't want much telling. I was born in the Transvaal--I'm a burgher. If my father didn't love the English, by the Lord, mann, I tell you, I hate them from the bottom of my soul."

The voice quavered and ran high. Once more, for no conceivable reason, Private Copper found his inward eye turned upon Umballa cantonments of a dry dusty afternoon, when the saddle-coloured son of a local hotel-keeper came to the barracks to complain of a theft of fowls. He saw the dark face, the plover's-egg-tinted eyeb.a.l.l.s, and the thin excited hands. Above all, he remembered the pa.s.sionate, queerly-strung words. Slowly he returned to South Africa, using the very sentence his sergeant had used to the poultry man.

"Go on with your complaint. I'm listenin'."

"Complaint! Complaint about _you_, you ox! We strip and kick your sort by thousands."

The young man rocked to and fro above the rifle, whose muzzle thus deflected itself from the pit of Private Copper's stomach. His face was dusky with rage.

"Yess, I'm a Transvaal burgher. It took us about twenty years to find out how rotten you were. _We_ know and you know it now. Your army--it is the laughing-stock of the Continent." He tapped the newspaper in his pocket, "You think you're going to win, you poor fools. Your people--your own people--your silly rotten fools of people will crawl out of it as they did after Majuba. They are beginning now. Look what your own working cla.s.ses, the diseased, lying, drinking white stuff that you come out of, are saying." He thrust the English weekly, doubled at the leading article, on Copper's knee. "See what dirty dogs your masters are. They do not even back you in your dirty work. _We_ cleared the country down to Ladysmith-- to Estcourt. We cleared the country down to Colesberg."

"Yes, we 'ad to clean up be'ind you. Messy, I call it."

"You've had to stop farm-burning because your people daren't do it. They were afraid. You daren't kill a spy. You daren't shoot a spy when you catch him in your own uniform. You daren't touch our loyall people in Cape Town! Your masters wont let you. You will feed our women and children till we are quite ready to take them back. _You_ can't put your cowardly noses out of the towns you say you've occupied. _You_ daren't move a convoy twenty miles. You think you've done something? You've done nothing, and you've taken a quarter of a million of men to do it! There isn't a n.i.g.g.e.r in South Africa that doesn't obey us if we lift our finger. You pay the stuff four pounds a month and they lie to you. _We_ flog 'em, as I shall flog you."

He clasped his hands together and leaned forward his out-thrust chin within two feet of Copper's left, or pipe hand.

"Yuss," said Copper, "it's a fair knock-out." The fist landed to a hair on the chin-point, the neck snicked like a gun-lock, and the back of the head crashed on the boulder behind.

Copper grabbed up both rifles, unshipped the cross-bandoliers, drew forth the English weekly, and picking up the lax hands, looked long and intently at the fingernails.

"No! Not a sign of it there," he said. "'Is nails are as clean as mine-- but he talks just like 'em, though. And he's a landlord too! A landed proprietor! Shockin', I call it."

The arms began to flap with returning consciousness. Private Copper rose up and whispered: "If you open your head, I'll bash it." There was no suggestion of sprain in the flung-back left boot. "Now walk in front of me, both arms perpendicularly elevated. I'm only a third-cla.s.s shot, so, if you don't object, I'll rest the muzzle of my rifle lightly but firmly on your collar-b.u.t.ton--coverin' the serviceable vertebree. If your friends see us thus engaged, you pray--'ard."

Private and prisoner staggered downhill. No shots broke the peace of the afternoon, but once the young man checked and was sick.

"There's a lot of things I could say to you," Copper observed, at the close of the paroxysm, "but it doesn't matter. Look 'ere, you call me 'pore Tommy' again."

The prisoner hesitated.

"Oh, I ain't goin' to do anythin' _to_ you. I'm recon-noiterin' in my own.

Say 'pore Tommy' 'alf-a-dozen times."

The prisoner obeyed.

"_That's_ what's been puzzlin' me since I 'ad the pleasure o' meetin'

you," said Copper. "You ain't 'alf-caste, but you talk _chee-chee_-- _pukka_ bazar chee-chee. Proceed."

"Hullo," said the Sergeant of the picket, twenty minutes later, "where did you round him up?"

"On the top o' yonder craggy mounting. There's a mob of 'em sitting round their Bibles seventeen 'undred yards (you said it was seventeen 'undred?) t'other side--an' I want some coffee." He sat down on the smoke-blackened stones by the fire.