Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland Part 3

The stranger watched the fire; then he said musingly, "I have seen a land far from here. In that land are men of two kinds who live side by side. Well nigh a thousand years ago one conquered the other; they have lived together since. Today the one people seeks to drive forth the other who conquered them. Are these men rebels, too?"

"Well," said Peter, pleased at being deferred to, "that all depends who they are, you know!"

"They call the one nation Turks, and the other Armenians," said the stranger.

"Oh, the Armenians aren't rebels," said Peter; "they are on our side! The papers are all full of it," said Peter, pleased to show his knowledge. "Those b.l.o.o.d.y Turks! What right had they to conquer the Armenians? Who gave them their land? I'd like to have a shot at them myself!"

"WHY are Armenians not rebels?" asked the stranger, gently.

"Oh, you do ask such curious questions," said Peter. "If they don't like the Turks, why should they have 'em? If the French came now and conquered us, and we tried to drive them out first chance we had; you wouldn't call us rebels! Why shouldn't they try to turn those b.l.o.o.d.y Turks out? Besides," said Peter, bending over and talking in the manner of one who imparts secret and important information; "you see, if we don't help the Armenians the Russians would; and we," said Peter, looking exceedingly knowing, "we've got to prevent that: they'd get the land; and it's on the road to India. And we don't mean them to. I suppose you don't know much about politics in Palestine?" said Peter, looking kindly and patronisingly at the stranger.

"If these men," said the stranger, "would rather be free, or be under the British Government, than under the Chartered Company, why, when they resist the Chartered Company, are they more rebels than the Armenians when they resist the Turk? Is the Chartered Company G.o.d, that every knee should bow before it, and before it every head be bent? Would you, the white men of England, submit to its rule for one day?"

"Ah," said Peter, "no, of course we shouldn't, but we are white men, and so are the Armenians--almost--" Then he glanced at the stranger's dark face, and added quickly, "At least, it's not the colour that matters, you know. I rather like a dark face, my mother's eyes are brown--but the Armenians, you know, they've got long hair like us."

"Oh, it is the hair, then, that matters," said the stranger softly.

"Oh, well," said Peter, "it's not altogether, of course. But it's quite a different thing, the Armenians wanting to get rid of the Turks, and these b.l.o.o.d.y n.i.g.g.e.rs wanting to get rid of the Chartered Company.

Besides, the Armenians are Christians, like us!"

"Are YOU Christians?" A strange storm broke across the stranger's features; he rose to his feet.

"Why, of course, we are!" said Peter. "We're all Christians, we English.

Perhaps you don't like Christians, though? Some Jews don't, I know,"

said Peter, looking up soothingly at him.

"I neither love nor hate any man for that which he is called," said the stranger; "the name boots nothing."

The stranger sat down again beside the fire, and folded his hands.

"Is the Chartered Company Christian also?" he asked.

"Yes, oh yes," said Peter.

"What is a Christian?" asked the stranger.

"Well, now, you really do ask such curious questions. A Christian is a man who believes in Heaven and h.e.l.l, and G.o.d and the Bible, and in Jesus Christ, that he'll save him from going to h.e.l.l, and if he believes he'll be saved, he will be saved."

"But here, in this world, what is a Christian?"

"Why," said Peter, "I'm a Christian--we're all Christians."

The stranger looked into the fire; and Peter thought he would change the subject. "It's curious how like my mother you are; I mean, your ways.

She was always saying to me, 'Don't be too anxious to make money, Peter.

Too much wealth is as bad as too much poverty.' You're very like her."

After a while Peter said, bending over a little towards the stranger, "If you don't want to make money, what did you come to this land for? No one comes here for anything else. Are you in with the Portuguese?"

"I am not more with one people than with another," said the stranger.

"The Frenchman is not more to me than the Englishman, the Englishman than the Kaffir, the Kaffir than the Chinaman. I have heard," said the stranger, "the black infant cry as it crept on its mother's body and sought for her breast as she lay dead in the roadway. I have heard also the rich man's child wail in the palace. I hear all cries."

Peter looked intently at him. "Why, who are you?" he said; then, bending nearer to the stranger and looking up, he added, "What is it that you are doing here?"

"I belong," said the stranger, "to the strongest company on earth."

"Oh," said Peter, sitting up, the look of wonder pa.s.sing from his face.

"So that's it, is it? Is it diamonds, or gold, or lands?"

"We are the most vast of all companies on the earth," said the stranger; "and we are always growing. We have among us men of every race and from every land; the Esquimo, the Chinaman, the Turk, and the Englishman, we have of them all. We have men of every religion, Buddhists, Mahomedans, Confucians, Freethinkers, Atheists, Christians, Jews. It matters to us nothing by what name the man is named, so he be one of us."

And Peter said, "It must be hard for you all to understand one another, if you are of so many different kinds?"

The stranger answered, "There is a sign by which we all know one another, and by which all the world may know us." (By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another.)

And Peter said, "What is that sign?"

But the stranger was silent.

"Oh, a kind of freemasonry!" said Peter, leaning on his elbow towards the stranger, and looking up at him from under his pointed cap. "Are there any more of you here in this country?"

"There are," said the stranger. Then he pointed with his hand into the darkness. "There in a cave were two women. When you blew the cave up they were left unhurt behind a fallen rock. When you took away all the grain, and burnt what you could not carry, there was one basketful that you knew nothing of. The women stayed there, for one was eighty, and one near the time of her giving birth; and they dared not set out to follow the remnant of their tribe because you were in the plains below. Every day the old woman doled grain from the basket; and at night they cooked it in their cave where you could not see their smoke; and every day the old woman gave the young one two handfuls and kept one for herself, saying, 'Because of the child within you.' And when the child was born and the young woman strong, the old woman took a cloth and filled it with all the grain that was in the basket; and she put the grain on the young woman's head and tied the child on her back, and said, 'Go, keeping always along the bank of the river, till you come north to the land where our people are gone; and some day you can send and fetch me.'

And the young woman said, 'Have you corn in the basket to last till they come?' And she said, 'I have enough.' And she sat at the broken door of the cave and watched the young woman go down the hill and up the river bank till she was hidden by the bush; and she looked down at the plain below, and she saw the spot where the kraal had been and where she had planted mealies when she was a young girl--"

"I met a woman with corn on her head and a child on her back!" said Peter under his breath.

"--And tonight I saw her sit again at the door of the cave; and when the sun had set she grew cold; and she crept in and lay down by the basket.

Tonight, at half-past three, she will die. I have known her since she was a little child and played about the huts, while her mother worked in the mealie fields. She was one of our company."

"Oh," said Peter.

"Other members we have here," said the stranger. "There was a prospector"--he pointed north; "he was a man who drank and swore when it listed him; but he had many servants, and they knew where to find him in need. When they were ill, he tended them with his own hands; when they were in trouble, they came to him for help. When this war began, and all black men's hearts were bitter, because certain white men had lied to them, and their envoys had been killed when they would have asked England to put her hand out over them; at that time certain of the men who fought the white men came to the prospector's hut. And the prospector fired at them from a hole he had cut in his door; but they fired back at him with an old elephant gun, and the bullet pierced his side and he fell on the floor:--because the innocent man suffers oftentimes for the guilty, and the merciful man falls while the oppressor flourishes. Then his black servant who was with him took him quickly in his arms, and carried him out at the back of the hut, and down into the river bed where the water flowed and no man could trace his footsteps, and hid him in a hole in the river wall. And when the men broke into the hut they could find no white man, and no traces of his feet. But at evening, when the black servant returned to the hut to get food and medicine for his master, the men who were fighting caught him, and they said, 'Oh, you betrayer of your people, white man's dog, who are on the side of those who take our lands and our wives and our daughters before our eyes; tell us where you have hidden him?' And when he would not answer them, they killed him before the door of the hut.

And when the night came, the white man crept up on his hands and knees, and came to his hut to look for food. All the other men were gone, but his servant lay dead before the door; and the white man knew how it must have happened. He could not creep further, and he lay down before the door, and that night the white man and the black lay there dead together, side by side. Both those men were of my friends."

"It was d.a.m.ned plucky of the n.i.g.g.e.r," said Peter; "but I've heard of their doing that sort of thing before. Even of a girl who wouldn't tell where her mistress was, and getting killed. But," he added doubtfully, "all your company seem to be n.i.g.g.e.rs or to get killed?"

"They are of all races," said the stranger. "In a city in the old Colony is one of us, small of stature and small of voice. It came to pa.s.s on a certain Sunday morning, when the men and women were gathered before him, that he mounted his pulpit: and he said when the time for the sermon came, 'In place that I should speak to you, I will read you a history.'

And he opened an old book more than two thousand years old: and he read: 'Now it came to pa.s.s that Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard, which was in Jezreel, hard by the palace of Ahab king of Samaria.

"'And Ahab spake unto Naboth, saying, Give me thy vineyard, that I may have it for a garden of herbs, because it is near unto my house: and I will give thee for it a better vineyard than it; or, if it seemeth good to thee, I will give thee the worth of it in money.

"'And Naboth said to Ahab, The Lord forbid it me, that I should give the inheritance of my father unto thee.

"'And Ahab came into his house heavy and displeased because of the word which Naboth the Jezreelite had spoken unto him; for he had said, I will not give thee the inheritance of my fathers.'

"The man read the whole story until it was ended. Then he closed the book, and he said, 'My friends, Naboth has a vineyard in this land; and in it there is much gold; and Ahab has desired to have it that the wealth may be his.'

"And he put the old book aside, and he took up another which was written yesterday. And the men and women whispered one to another, even in the church, 'Is not that the Blue Book Report of the Select Committee of the Cape Parliament on the Jameson raid?'

"And the man said, 'Friends, the first story I have read you is one of the oldest stories of the world: the story I am about to read you is one of the newest. Truth is not more truth because it is three thousand years old, nor is it less truth because it is of yesterday. All books which throw light on truth are G.o.d's books, therefore I shall read to you from the pages before me. Shall the story of Ahab king of Samaria profit us when we know not the story of the Ahabs of our day; and the Naboths of our land be stoned while we sit at east?' And he read to them portions of that book. And certain rich men and women rose up and went out even while he spoke, and his wife also went out.