The Outspan: Tales of South Africa

Nairn’s eyelids drooped heavily. One sleepy chuckle escaped him at his own quaint conceit, as he wondered whether the ceiling boards considered the flooring boards beneath them, and if they ever put on side on that account; and the smile of lazy content remained long after he was fast asleep.

It was the scent of flowers that roused him. Violets! And he had not smelt them for twelve years!

Miss Kate was sitting there looking at him, and, but for the scent of the flowers and the slanting sunbeams, he might have thought she had never left.

“Does the big bear like flowers?”

He was too contented to do more than smile. “And he won’t eat me now?”

“When Beauty picked the flowers, what did the Beast do?”

Kate looked up with a shade of alarm. She was not quite sure where analogies might lead them – they get to mean so much.

“Well, well,” she laughed, “who would have suspected you of a leaning towards fairy tales? Why don’t you ask if I enjoyed my ride?”

“Well, did you?”

“Listen to him! Well, did I? Oh,” said Miss Kate, pushing back her chair with a sigh of mock despair, “you’ll never learn! It is not in you to be ordinarily civil. Now listen, and I’ll teach you; and now repeat after me: ‘I hope – ’”

“I hope – ”

“No, no! You must hope with greater warmth. Say, ‘I hope you have enjoyed – ’”

“I hope you have enjoyed – ”

“‘Your ride immensely!’”

“Your ride immensely!”

“That’s better. And ‘I’m very glad indeed – ’”

“And I’m very glad indeed – ”

“‘That you went out.’”

“No, I’m hanged if I’ll say that!”

“Mister Nairn!”

“No; I don’t care what you say! I won’t say that! I’m not going to perjure myself.”

“You must say it!”

“Not if I die for it!”

“You won’t say it to oblige me?”

“N-no.”

There was a curious pause. Kate looked down, saying softly:

“Well, if you won’t do the first thing I have ever asked you, I suppose I’d better go.”

Women, not excepting the very best, are often most unfair, and sometimes even mean. Why change in a breath from chaff to deadly earnest, and wring a man’s heart out with half a look and a catch in the voice? Nairn succumbed.

“No, don’t go. I’ll say it.”

“Well?”

“But I’ve forgotten the words.”

“No; you can’t have forgotten so quickly. Say, ‘I’m very glad indeed that you went out.’”

“I’m very glad indeed that – ”

“Go on!”

“That – that you’ve come back.”

“I can see that you want to drive me away.”

“No, don’t – don’t go! ‘That you went out.’ Heaven forgive me! There, are you satisfied?”

“Yes, I’m satisfied now. I hate to give in – especially to a man.”

“And to a woman?”

“Oh, I never give in to a woman. Women are so obstinate, and they’re always wrong! What are you laughing at? Oh, well, I’m not like a woman now. I’m – you know what I mean – I’m stating the case. Besides, I meant other women.”

“Now, if I tell you something, you won’t laugh at me and point the finger of scorn and press the heel of triumph?”

“No, I won’t.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

“Well, then, I am glad that you went out, and I was a bear to grudge it to you. And you – you have been far too good to me – far too good.”

“No, no – indeed no! You are my charge, and I am your nurse. And, remember, had it not been for us you would not have been hurt. Had it not been for you we should not have been here. We brought you to death’s door, and you saved us. I – I was only teasing you. I never meant – ”

“Kate, child, Kate!”

“Hush! No, no – not now. Here is George. Good-night.”

Yes, truly! The – man – finds – it – out – soon – enough!

In the morning Nairn and his horse were gone, and there was not a vestige of a trace to show how, why, or where! It was several days later that Geddy, who had been away for some weeks, dined at Heron’s, and, as they were sitting on the stoep smoking and chatting, remarked:

“By the way, fancy whom I met on the way in! Our old friend Induna Nairn, looking ghastly, poor devil! Said he’d had a spill crossing a river or something. Surlier than ever. Glared at me with positive hatred when I asked him where he was going to to escape civilisation, and said, ‘Zambesi, or hell.’ I could make nothing of him. Can’t stand chaff, you know; never could. But I heard all about him from old Tom Callan – ‘Hot Tom,’ you know.”

Heron looked up curiously, but did not interrupt.

“It seems he’s quite a great gun among the niggers – a real Induna. Did you know that? I thought it was only a nickname, but it isn’t. He’s a sort of relation of the king’s, etc.”

“What the devil are you talking about?”

“Eh? what? A – a relation of the king’s, I said.”

“A relation! Nairn?”

“Well, a connection. You know what I mean. He married the king’s favourite daughter.”

“Great God!”

“Yes. You see, we were quite on the wrong tack. By George! I did laugh when I heard it.”

Heron walked out on to the gravel path for a breath of air – out to ease the choking feeling in his throat; and he saw his sister rise from her chair, draw a shawl over her head, and move away to her own room.

That night there had come to the house a little Swazie boy. He had one very miserable fowl for sale, and he squatted on his haunches near the gate, heedless of the fact that his offer had been twice refused. Through the night he stayed, and into the morning, and as the hot sun swung overhead he sat and waited still, never taking his eyes off the front stoep. And when at last Kate came out he tried his luck again.

She turned her armchair so as to get a good light on her book, and began to read, but in a few moments the child’s voice close by startled her. She looked up and saw a little black face, lighted by bright eyes and a flash of white teeth; in front of that, a wretched fowl lying on the cement stoep; and in front of that again, a folded note bearing her name. She picked up the note and read it.

“I had forgotten what a good woman was. Heaven bless you, Kate! It is not that I am ungrateful, but I wish to God Piet had left me to the river.”

Kate leaned back quietly in the Madeira armchair, and closed her eyes. When she looked again the little umfaan was gone; but he had forgotten his fowl upon the stoep, which was an unusual thing for any umfaan to do.

Chapter Four.

Cassidy

“And the greatest of these is charity.”

I met Cassidy under trying circumstances. But it worked out all right eventually, principally because, so far as I knew him – and that got to be pretty well – Cassidy was not amenable to circumstances. He beat them mostly, and some of them were pretty tough.

The circumstances surrounding our meeting were trying, because Cassidy was in bed after a hard day’s work, and I aroused him at 3 a.m. by firing a revolver at his bulldog. His huts were on the railway works, and near the footpath to Jim Mackay’s canteen – a pretty hot show. He used to be roused this way every Saturday and Sunday, and occasionally throughout the week, by visitors, black and white, warlike and friendly, thieving and sociable, but all drunk. At first he got a bulldog, but they got to know him, and after awhile the tip went round that half a pound of beefsteak was a good buy and better than a blunderbuss for Cassidy’s Cutting. Then he loaded fifty Number 12’s with coarse salt, mixed with pebbles and things, and, as he said to me afterwards:

“Ye were the fourth that night, and ye ’noyed me wid yer swearin’ an’ shootin’ an’ that, so I just passed the salt an’ wint for the dust shot as bein’ more convincing like; but the divil an’ all of it was, I couldn’t get the cartridge in by reason of drawin’ the charge that was there already. Too bad! too bad! for dust shot it was, av I’d only known it, an’ me thinkin’ it was nothin’ but salt. Lord, Lord! we’re a miscontented lot! Av it wasn’t for bein’ greedy, I’d ’ve had ye wid the dust shot safe as death. Faith, ye niver know yer luck!”

That was all right from his point of view, but as I had left my horse dying of Dikkop sickness just this side of Kilo 26, and had walked along the formation carrying saddle and bridle up to Kilo 43 – about ten miles – without a drink, and twice lost my way between unconnected sections, and twice walked over the ends of the formation where culverts should have been and rolled down twenty feet of embankment, and once got bogged in a bottoming pit in a vlei, and many times hacked my shins against wheelbarrows and piles of picks stacked on the track, I think it was reasonable to let out at a bulldog that came at me like a hurricane out of the darkness and silence of 3 a.m. in the Bush veld, to say nothing of a half-finished railway cutting. And I think it only human to have cursed the owner with all my resources until the dog was called off.

I don’t exactly know how it came about, but I slept in Cassidy’s hut that night. He pushed me in before him, guiding me to the bed with a hand on each elbow. He said that there were no matches in the show and that it wasn’t worth while looking for the candle, which, as he had no means of lighting it, I suppose it wasn’t.

He had a rare brogue and a governing nasal drone, but it was the brogue that emboldened me to ask for whisky.

“Spirits!” said he; “not a drop, an’ niver have; but jist sit ye where ye are, an’ I’ll fetch ye out some beer – Bass’s, no less, av ye’ll thry that; and can dhrink from the bottle.”

He talked in jerks, and had a quaint knack of chucking remarks after an apparently completed sentence, evidently intending them to catch up to it and be tacked on. He dived under the bed somewhere, and a minute later I heard the squeaking of a corkscrew and the popping of a cork.

“Here y’ are,” said he, as he pressed the bottle into my two hands; “drink hearty, me lad, and praise yer God Dan O’Connell there’s got too fat an’ lazy to pull ye down.”

I dare say he knew what he was talking about, but, for my part, I confess that nothing in the whole business had impressed me less than any lack of earnestness on Dan O’Connell’s part. I sat awhile munching biscuits from a tin which he had placed on the table and gurgling down beer from the bottle. Cassidy was asleep. Ten minutes passed, and I was finishing the beer, when he sat up again, as I judged from the sound, and remarked in a brisk, clear tone:

“Ye called me a mud-dollopin’, dyke-diggin’, Amsterdam’d Dutchman! Ye’ll take back the Dutchman, I believe?”

“I will indeed,” I said, laughing.

“An’ the mud?”

“Yes, and the mud.”

He settled himself in the bunk again with a grunt, and murmured in a tone of indignant contempt:

“Mud, sez he, mud! An’ me shiftin’ granite boulders for soft rock, an shtruck solid formation a fut from surface, an’ getting two an’ six a cubic fer the lot! Mud, faith! An’ not enough water this three miles to the Crocodile to make spit for an ant, barrin’ what I can tap from the Figaro Battery pipe! An’ mud, sez he? Holy Fly! Mud, be Gawd!”

It died away in a sleepy grunt, and Cassidy was off I groped about for a blanket, and, rolling back into the meal-sack stretcher, forgot all about mad Irishmen, sick horses, and earnest bulldogs.

One always experiences a curious sensation on seeing by daylight that which one has only known in the dark. Persons do for years a certain journey or voyage, always starting and always arriving at regular hours. One day something happens which necessitates their passing in daylight the places formerly passed at night. On such occasions even the most matter-of-fact must marvel at the wanton freaks of their imaginations. The real thing seems so inconceivably wrong after what the mind had pictured. The appearance of a room, the outside of a house, are ludicrously, hopelessly at variance with what one had thought they should be. But it is, if possible, worse when the subject is a person. I have many times travelled with men at night by coach, on horseback, on foot, and in a waggon; have chatted sociably and exchanged all manner of friendly turns; have slept at the same wayside hotel, and in the morning found myself unable, until he spoke, to pick out of any two the one with whom I had spent hours the night before.

In the case of Cassidy the difference was appalling.

I awoke in such light as might leak through the grass hut; which was very little for light, but not bad for leakage.

The boy brought breakfast – coffee, bread, and cold venison, which suited me well – and I was turning my thoughts to the matter of a fresh horse for my homeward journey when I met the eye of one of my friends of the previous night. I say the eye, because I don’t count the one in the black patch – I couldn’t see it. But when Dan O’Connell stood in the doorway and allowed his one bloodshot, pink-rimmed eye to rest thoughtfully on me, it fairly fixed me. I used to recall his bandy legs and undershot jaw long afterwards whenever I thought of Cassidy’s Cutting; but it was only when the luminous eye uprose before me that I used unconsciously to twitch about and draw my legs up as I did the morning I saw him in the flesh. Cassidy was a surprise; O’Connell wasn’t. His appearance was only the cold chill of proof following a horrible conviction. I was much relieved when the boy cleared Dan out of the doorway with a bare-toed kick in the ribs and a vigorous “Ow! Foosack!” I admired the boy for that, and even envied him.

Through the open doorway I saw a white man walking briskly towards the hut, and I stepped out to meet him. He was a man of medium height, but there was something in his walk and figure that arrested attention. I am sure I have never seen in any man such lithe, active movement and perfect symmetry. A close-fitting vest and a pair of white flannel trousers were what he wore. I remember that because, somehow, I always recall that first view in the morning light – the springy walk, the bare muscular arms, the curve of the chest, and the poise of the head, as the face was turned from me.

If I could tell this story without saying another word about his appearance, I would stop right here. I would greatly prefer to do so, but it is not possible. I hope no one will feel exactly as I felt when this man turned his face to me. It serves no good purpose to give revolting details, so I will only say that the man was disfigured – most horribly so.

I cannot recall what was said or done during the few minutes that passed after we met, but there are some impressions seared into my brain as with red-hot irons; there are some recollections which even now make me feel faint and dazed, and some which make me burn with shame. I take shame – bitter, burning shame – that I failed to grasp his outstretched hand, and that I let him read in my face the horror that seized me. It is one of those pitiful things that the longest lifetime is not long enough to let a man forget. Surging across this comes the vivid recollection of my conviction that this man was Cassidy. The first instant my glance lighted on him I felt what I can only call a sort of joyous conviction that it was he. I felt, in fact, that I recognised him. No doubt it seems odd, illogical, contradictory, even impossible, that, strong as the gratifying conviction was, the other, when he turned his face to me, was a thousand times stronger. It ought to have been a reversal of the first conviction. It wasn’t. It was a smashing, terrible corroboration. It crushed me with a sense of personal affliction. It never germinated a doubt.

I had to stay all that day with him, and he was most gentle and courteous; most kindly and considerate. Every act heaped coals of fire on my ill-conditioned head. God knows I tried my best, but I could hardly look in his face, and I could not control my physical repugnance. I schooled myself to speak, and even to look, without betraying my thoughts, but I could not eat with him. I could not sit opposite a face half of which was gone; I could not use the plate, the cup, the fork, that he had used. I pleaded illness, and feigned it; but by night-time I was ill enough to need no feigning.

It was common enough for anyone benighted on those unhealthy flats to pay the penalty with a dose of fever. I got fever, and no one seemed surprised; but for the life of me I cannot even now help attaching some significance to the fact that I was certainly not ill before the scene at the hut door.

I lay in that grass hut for a week or more, some of the time delirious – all the time panting with fever and shivering with ague; tossing wakefully and gasping for air; complaining of everything, unutterably miserable and despondent; hating the sight of food, shrinking from each act of kindness, scowling at the sound of a voice. My case was not worse than hundreds of others. I mention these things only to make clear what I mean when I say that never at any moment during that time did I awake or want anything but Cassidy was there to tend me. His was the care, the watchfulness, the gentleness, of a good woman. Can one say more?

It is odd that during that time I only saw him as he ought to have been – as I am sure at one time he had been – a man whose countenance matched his character. It is not so odd, perhaps, that as I recovered and became rational the feeling of repulsion did not return, only an infinite pity for a hardly-stricken fellow-creature whose physical endowments and whose prospects must have been far above the average, and whose affliction was proportionately great.

When I left there was one feeling that was stronger than simple gratitude to him. It was thankfulness that something had occurred to prevent me from leaving with only horror and repulsion. I was thankful for the sickness that left me richer by a heart full of pity and – I think the right word is – reverence!

My lines were laid in other places than Cassidy’s, and as months passed by without my either seeing or hearing of him, I might, for aught I know, have forgotten him, or come to recall him only as one recalls, after lapse of years, some curious experience. This might have happened, I say; but it didn’t. Mainly because of a conversation which revived my keenest interest in him.

Several of us had walked out to dine and spend the evening at the Chaunceys’, and as we sat on the stoep smoking and chatting, the ladies being with us, the conversation turned on a concert or entertainment of some kind which was being got up for the relief of some distressed families in the place. Somebody hazarded the opinion that the “distressed family” business was being somewhat overdone, and that there was no evidence of it as far as he had been able to see.

The remark was unfortunate, for Mrs Chauncey happened to be one of the promoters of the charity. She – good little woman! – had her young matron’s soul full of sympathy still; her store had not been plundered by impostors, and she vehemently defended her project. She did more; she carried war and rout into the enemy’s quarters and surmised that men, young men, whose lives are divided between money-making and pleasure-seeking, are not the best judges of what those who keep their troubles to themselves may have to endure.

“When you,” (the young men) “are settling differences on shares or cards, or having your occasional splits – or whatever else you do all day long – there are women and children aching for one good meal, shrinking back for want of ordinary clothing, languishing and dropping for want of a man’s arm to fend and support them.”

Jack Chauncey – good chap! – must have thought this from his wife just a wee bit spirited, for, after a pause, he gently drew a herring across the trail.

“By – the – by, dear,” he asked thoughtfully, “what became of that good-looking young widow who came here with her kid and looked so jolly miserable? By Gad! her face has been haunting me ever since. Did you manage anything for her?”

“You mean Mrs Mallandane. She would not take anything. She wanted to work; to earn, not to beg, she said. I have managed to get her some needlework, but, oh, so little, poor thing! And the pay is too dreadful! Now, there is a case in point. A widow, absolutely penniless, with a child of four or five to support. A woman of education and breeding, without a friend in the world, apparently; shunned by everyone – by some on account of her poverty, by others for her good looks and reserve. She certainly is difficult to approach. I have been to her now four times, and it was only on the last occasion that she thawed enough to tell me anything of herself. She has lived for years on what she believed to be the proceeds of her husband’s estate. Until within the last few months she was under this impression. But something happened which made her suspicious, and she found out that the income left by her husband was pure fiction, and that what she had been living on was an allowance from the only real friend she or her husband ever had – the man who was her husband’s partner when he died.”

“Does she say that her husband is dead?” asked Carter, the unfortunate “young man” who had before provoked Mrs Chauncey’s ire.

Carter was very young, and I could see that he had no arrière pensée in asking that question. He did not mean to be impertinent. But I could also see that Mrs Chauncey did not take that view. Her little iced reply finished poor Carter.

“I said that she was a widow, Mr Carter, and I do not care to make another’s misfortunes the subject of an argument.”

I felt sorry for Carter, he was such an ass; and I believe the other two fellows pitied him also; so we did not refer to the subject as we walked home together in the moonlight. That, however, did not suit Carter. After awhile he gave an uncomfortable laugh, and said:

“The little woman was rather down on me to-night about the charity show. I rather put my foot in it, I think.”

“Think!” said Lawton (one of our party), with heavy contempt. “Think! I wonder you claim to be able to think! I never in my life saw anyone make such a blighted idiot of himself!”

“Dash it all, man! give me a chance. The ‘distressed family’ allusion was unlucky, I admit; but I hadn’t the faintest intention of returning to the subject when I asked about the husband. Man alive! Why, the nerve of the Mallandane woman fairly knocked the breath out of me. The cheek of her cramming poor Mrs Chauncey with yarns of her husband’s death and estate, when everyone knows that he isn’t dead at all; that she gave him the slip, and went off with the ‘only friend’ – his partner! A man with half his face eaten away by disease. I’ve seen the fellow at the house myself Old Larkin, of the Bank, knew them in Kimberley. They were claim-holders and contractors there and used to bank with him. The firm was Cassidy and Mallandane. I only wonder she continues to call herself Mallandane. It’s a formality she might as well have dispensed with.”

I knew Carter to be a gossipy young devil, so I held my peace about Cassidy; but it was with an effort. My impulse was to give Carter the lie direct, but I remembered Mrs Chauncey’s last words and refrained.

We walked along in silence, and after a while Carter stopped in the road opposite a small house, the door of which stood partly open. There were voices outside, and as Carter said, “Hush! listen!” we stopped instinctively, and my heart sank as I recognised a voice that said “Good-night.” I moved on hastily, disgusted at being trapped into eavesdropping, and Carter laughed.

“That’s the only friend! There’s no mistaking that. But I wonder why he’s coming away,” said the youth, with unmistakable and insinuating emphasis on the last words.

No one answered his self-satisfied cackling. I was listening to the brisk walk behind us. I would have known it in a million. Closer and closer it came; his sleeve brushed mine as he stepped lightly past. I let him go, and I don’t know why. But I felt like a whipped cur for doing it.

It seemed to me that I must heretofore have been living in extraordinary ignorance of what was going on round about me in a small place; for, as though it only needed the start, from the first mention of this story by Carter I was always hearing it, or a similar one, or one half corroborating it.

I made an effort to see Cassidy the first thing next morning, but he had left his hotel – presumably having gone out to the works again. After a day or two had passed I felt glad that I had not met him – glad because I felt sure that he would have noticed that there was something wrong. He would instinctively have detected the cordiality and confidence which were controlled by an effort of will, and were not – as they should have been, and as they did again become – spontaneous and real.