Chapter IV: Vicisti Galilaee! (3)

The talk turned on pilgrimages at last; we spoke of many Shrines, of old-time ones and of others in the heyday of their youth still. Greenwood talked well on that subject. Was the aura of his own Saint in the air of that dispensary? He talked with a passionate faith about more than one Shrine, that left me almost breathless.

Then we argued about the Pilgrims' Way in Kent, as to where it was that most pilgrims forded the Medway, and about certain homely Kentish legends.

Suddenly he rose and went to the door. He looked out on the mighty vista of sable earth and spangled sky.

'The moon is just going down and you ought to be sleeping,' he said. 'And remember there is my tale still to tell.'

So we went to the Church. We had one candle between us there. Moreover, the purple lamp was burning, its quaint cup of wire-gauze averted doom from many self-immolant flies. We knelt beneath it, and he said the Prayers of the Shrine, then our own prayers followed then he began to tell:

'I was coming back from England twenty months ago and I chose to come by the East Coast. It is a beautiful way to come. I saw Zanzibar, where there are many hopes and memories. I slept two nights far out of the city there, in a grove of palm trees. Then the boat came back from the mainland and I went aboard again.

'We started for a four days' voyage or so, to Beira. She came aboard at Zanzibar, I think. Some one told me this, when I asked about her afterwards. But I was never really conscious of her presence till the second night of our voyaging. Then we met at a Concert in the Third Class, that I had strolled down the deck to patronize. To my shame I was traveling second, while she was in the crowded family of the third. I went and spoke to her.

'A child had had a bad fall from some steps, and she was mothering him. It was a lovely and pleasant thing to see how she did it.

'He should wake up without much pain,' she said, with a smile, at last. She handed the boy to his own admiring mother. Then she turned to me, for I had been asking after him.

'She began to talk about our common work. "I want to climb on a new boat at Chinde, and go the way of the Lakes," she said.

'Are you going to teach?' I asked.

'"I hope I may teach at whiles," she said, "But I am sent first of all to heal."

'She told me about her hopes for her work.

'"They tell me I have healing hands," she said. "I have a seed-grain of faith, I think, and that is the secret of them."

'I saw her only for a few moments. I will try to tell you or rather to show you what she looked like, when I have ended my story. She enlightened me not a little. I saw how lame a thing my own journey was my leisurely dawdling back to my work. This girl came as it were on wings, with power in her heart and will, that would take no denial but God's. Her few words as we walked up and down the well-deck were words that burnt and shone in the cold dark. I am talking about things as I saw them just then. As a matter of fact, I believe it was a blazing night with a moon at the full, and stars dropping over one another. I remember that I slept on deck afterwards. I had a sort of Midsummer South African Christmas picnic feeling (up till cock-crow, when the fever that had dogged me that month came again). It was really a consummate night. But as she talked, she made it seem cold and dark, her words were so radiantly kind.

'T think we talked about Saint Vincent of Paris mostly, and of men that had carried in their bodies the marks of the Lord Jesus; and of the imitation of Jesus in India and Africa. Then she said "Good night!" and was gone.

'Next day that return of fever blurred my new visions of the Light. Yet I was to see her again. An hour before we came off Chinde, she asked leave to come up on to our second-class deck and to bid me "Good-bye."

'I was lying in a deck-chair, my hat tilted over my eyes, under the morning sun. She was suddenly beside me and speaking to me. She gave me a watchword out of that confident ending of Saint Mark, to which, some people, who have their misgivings, attach so little credit. It was this, "They shall lay hands on the sick and they shall recover." Then she prayed for me, lifting up her healing hands. And she held out to me a tiny flask that I might anneal myself, "For that is your own office," she said.

'My head had defied sleep, but now sleep came apace. It seemed to me it came breathing about me with the light gusts of wind. I slept, nor did I know when she said "Good-bye."

'When I awoke the sun was westering. Some passengers had trans-shipped for Chinde four hours or more ago, a man told me. She was gone, and I was well. No, not well in one way, but mending. That is all or almost all of my tale.'

He had told it reverently. Towards the end of the telling, he himself seemed to wander as he told.

'What was she like?' I asked after a silence.

'She was much like that picture of Saint Lucy,' he said.

'I found a man in the third class, who had taken a really fine photo of her, not a little snapshot. I had helped him with a sketch of the voyage he was writing for some magazine, and he was pleased enough to print me another copy. I sent it home that month. A friend painted me that panel. I suggested that the name of the Saint should be Lucy, it was on Saint Lucy's day she had said "Good-bye." The picture came a day or two before this Midsummer. He has done wondrously well, I think, if you remember that he never saw her.'

'How do you know that he never saw her?' I asked.

'Yes, you may well say that,' he said. 'I sometimes think that he had seen her, even as I. He has painted something of her light and spirit. Look how she threads' that forest by night!' He held the candle near, then he pulled it away.

'Forgive me! How can you see her duly by this light? You must have a real session before her in the morning.'

I awoke early, but not too early, as it seemed to me. Dawn was growing very bright, and spring seemed to be in the air that came from the doorway. I sprang up and looked out. Light that was already almost flame kindled the east. The leaves of the grove about me had their spring colors on. There was quite enough illumination to show how brilliant and tender they were ruddy and green and mauve, and bronze that was almost gold. Day was coming fast and so was Spring. I turned within and lit the candles on the Altar. The purple lamp was burning low. I knelt down, and saw Dawn and Spring, aye, and Summer too, in that picture. Eastern light was streaming from that lantern Saint Lucy held. It was of coral and silver set with pearls. Eastern light was in her happy face. You could see even in that cock-crow dusk in the forest, how the fig-tree and all the trees were stirring for Spring and Summer. I took note now that Saint Lucy's wreath was of orchard leaves and blossoms. I lifted up my thanksgiving there and then, as the first sunbeams shone about me, for the rest and the light that I had found, found at last for good as I hope in sultry and weary Africa.

Soon we were kneeling at the morning Sacrifice, then we went out and broke our fast in the sunshine, sitting on rocks by the wood fire. How hungry I was in that hill's pure air!

When he had done, Greenwood showed me some of the workings of the Shrine. A young mother, filleted and stately, brought her baby to him. Almost naked but roped with beads, the boy hung in the pied sheep-skin at her back. Greenwood folded a handkerchief that he had brought from the Altar about his dusky head. It was of faded blue and silver. Then he said prayers to the Father and to Christ, and again to both of them, for the prayers of Saint Lucy and that other.

'It is not good to drug children so young, is it? He asked the question as though defending himself.

'I think this may soothe him better than a powder.'

He told me how he had found that kerchief wrapped about his own head on a certain sunny day when he lay sick aboard ship. 'It was hers,' he said, 'handkerchiefs and aprons are Bible remedies.'

Other pilgrims or patients came to him after that mother with her child. He persuaded three or four of them to carry letters to the doctor in the town. But he prayed for these too, and signed them with oil from the Shrine lamp, ere he trusted them to his friend's salves or surgery. By and by came three young men with a boy. He was stricken and mad, they said. He had come home from work in a distant town last month. Now he would stay speechless for hours. He would wander far by day, and brood over the fire by night.

'Let him stay if he will,' Greenwood said. 'Let him wait in peace here, and eat and sleep his fill, if he so desires. If he shall sleep in the Holy Place a few nights, who can say what wonder Christ may do?'

The boy seemed to be an old friend of his, and stayed quietly by him. His companions started off joyously down the hill, one of them playing on the marimba. 'This is Merrie England come again,' said I. 'Did not an unburnt Lollard upbraid the bagpipe din or other music of pilgrims long ago? Wasn't that "lewd losel" told by the Kentish Archbishop how useful such music might be say if a pilgrim struck his toe on a stone?'

'There are many pilgrims at this Shrine,' said Greenwood smiling. 'I am glad about it. I think she would be glad if she knew.'

'Where is she?' I asked. 'Doesn't she know?'

'I have tried hard to track her,' he said. 'Not a trace have I found. I have asked our missions, I have asked the White Fathers. I have asked Africans and Scots and Dutch and Portuguese. But she has gone on her way out of sight.'

'She has done some work here,' I said.

'Yes,' he said, 'Angel or Saint, Faith Healer or Revenante from Paradise, she has worked wonders here. Do you know, there is a simple native cure I have ever so much faith in? It comes from the root of a tree. Have not some men and women the same sort of virtue in their wills and hands that trees have in their roots? I seem to see men and women such as Father John of Kronstadt and this my Saint Lucy of the Ship even as trees walking.

The outstanding virtue of my patroness was surely in her blossom, and in the fruit that blossom can yet bring forth. "As the apple-tree among the trees of the wood" I found her. I sat down under her shadow for those moments of time. And now, and all my days of grace, will her fruit be sweet to my taste.'

THE BLACK DEATH

This is a story of a voyage home. The boat was one of the finest on the line and we were not overcrowded. We had wonderful weather that trip, brilliant sunshine relieved by a fresh little breeze that kept its place, doing its duty without taking too much upon itself, or making itself obnoxious. In the third-class we were quiet on the whole, and what is called well-behaved, though neither with millennial serenity nor millennial sobriety.

A red-cheeked gentleman took a red-cheeked married lady and her child under his vigilant protection. Two or three Rhodesians and Jo'burgers enriched the bar with faithful fondness. Cards and sweeps on the run of the boat and the selling of sweep-tickets these all stimulated the circulation of savings. Hues of language vied with hues of sunset not seldom of an eventide.

Life was not so very thrilling on that voyage, the treading of 'border-land dim 'twixt vice and virtue' is apt to be rather a dull business.

There was no such incident as that which stirred us on another voyage the taking of a carving knife to the purser by a drunkard. On the other hand there was no unusual battle-noise of spiritual combat such as may have quickened the pulses of one or two of the boats the year of the English Mission.

We were middling, and dull at that, on the "Sluys Castle," till we reached Madeira. Then the description I have given of our voyage ceases to apply. The two or three days after that were exciting enough to one or two passengers at any rate.

James Carraway had come down from Kimberley, he told me. He was a spare, slight man, with a red moustache. He sought me occasionally of an eventide, and confided to me views of life in general, and of some of his fellow-passengers in particular. I remember one night especially, when the Southern Cross was in full view and the water about the keel splotched with phosphorescence. Carraway had a big grievance that night. He commented acridly on a colored woman that I had espied on board. She was not very easily visible herself, but one or two faintly colored children played often about the deck, and she herself might now and then be seen nursing a baby. I had seen her on a bench sometimes when I had gone to the library to change a book. I had seen her more rarely in the sunshine on deck, nursing the aforesaid baby.

'One man's brought a Kaffir wife on board,' growled Carraway.

I said, 'I thought she might be a nurse.'

'No, she's his wife,' contended Carraway. 'It's cheek of him bringing her on board with the third-class passengers.'

I said, 'Which is her husband?'

'He's been pointed out to me,' he said. 'The other white men seem rather to avoid him. I don't know what your opinion on this point may be,' he said. 'I consider that a man who marries a Kaffir sinks to her status.'

I said nothing. He did not like my silence much, I gathered. He was not so very cordial afterwards. He was a man with many grievances Carraway.

When we were drawing close to Madeira, two nights before, on the Sunday, Carraway touched the subject again.

The parson had preached incidentally on the advisability of being white--white all round. I thought he played to his gallery a bit, in what he said.

'An excellent sermon,' said Carraway. 'Did you hear how he got at that josser with the Kaffir wife? That parson's a white man.'

I said nothing.

'What God hath divided let no man unite,' said Carraway, improving the occasion. 'I don't uphold Kaffirs. The white man must always be top dog,' etc., etc.

Carraway grew greasily fluent on rather well-worn lines. I smoked my pipe and made no comment. By-and-bye he tired of his monologue.

He gave me no further confidences till the night after we left Madeira.

Then he came to me suddenly about eleven o'clock as I stood on the well-deck, smoking a pipe before turning in.

'Come and have a walk,' he said, in a breathless sort of way.

We climbed some steps and paced the upper deck towards the wheel-house. There were few electric lights burning now. After a turn or two he drew up under one of them, and looked round to see whether anyone listened.

'Don't give me away for God's sake,' he said. He held up a hand towards the light pathetically. 'It's showing,' he said. 'God knows why. God knows what I've done to bring it.'

I said nothing, but looked at him and considered him carefully. He certainly did not seem to be drunk.

Then I examined the hand he gave me.

'I don't see anything particular,' I said. 'What's wrong?'

'Good Lord! The nails.'

But the nails looked to me pink and healthy.

'Tell me,' I said, 'What you think's wrong.'

Yet he could not tell me that night. He tried to tell me. He was just like a little boy in most awful trepidation, trying to confess some big transgression. He gasped and spluttered, but he never got it out that night. I couldn't make head nor tail of what he said. After he was gone to bed it is true I put two and two together and guessed something. But I was fairly puzzled at the time.

'You're a bit upset to-night,' I said. 'You're not quite yourself, it's the sea I suppose, or something. Come to bed and get a good night.' His teeth chattered as he came down the ladder. I got him down to his cabin.

'Thanks!' he said. 'Good night! I may come all right in the morning. Anyhow I'll have a bath and try.'

He said it so naively that I could not help laughing.

'Yes, have a sea-water-bath, a jolly good idea,' I said. 'You'll have to be up early. There's only one and there's a run on it before breakfast. Goodnight!'

I saw him again in the morning outside the bathroom. He came out in his pink-and-white pyjamas; the pink was aggressive and fought with the tint of his moustache. He looked very blue and wretched.

'Well,' I asked, 'Have you slept it off whatever it was?'

'No,' he said, 'let me tell you about it.' He began to gasp and splutter.

Just then another postulant came up, making for the bath-room door.

'Afterwards!' I said, 'After breakfast.' And I vanished into the bath-room. It was probably Carraway, I thought, that had left a little collection of soaps in that bath-room. He had brought a bucket of fresh water with him apparently to give them a fair trial. There was yellow soap, a pumice stone, and carbolic soap, and scented soap. 'I'll keep them for him,' I thought. 'Somebody may jump them if I leave them here. I wonder why in the world he's so distrait.' I had my suspicions as to the reason, and I laughed softly to myself.

After breakfast he invited me back to the bathroom; there was no run on it then.

'It's quiet,' he said. Then after many gasps and splutters he enlightened me. His nails were turning color, he told me.

'Anyone would think I had Kaffir blood in me,' he said.

Also his skin was giving him grave cause for solicitude. I did not resist the temptation to take him rather seriously. I administered philosophic consolation. I reminded him of Dumas and other serviceable colored people. I rather enjoyed his misery; poetic justice seemed to me to need some satisfaction. He, the negrophobe, who was so ultra-keen on drawing the line was now enjoying imaginative experiences on the far side of it.

'It seems then,' I remarked, 'That you are now a person of color.'

He nearly fainted. He did not swear. He seemed to have lost all his old truculence. He began to whimper like a child.

'After all, I never shared your prejudices.' I said. 'Cheer up, old man, I won't drop you like a hot potato even if you have a touch of the tar brush.'

He cried as if his heart would break. I saw I had gone too far. If was like dancing on a trodden worm.

'Carraway,' I said, 'It's a pure delusion. Your nails are all right, and so's your skin. You're dreaming, man. You've got nerves or indigestion, or something. It's something inside you that's wrong. There's nothing outside for anyone to see.'

His eyes gleamed. He shook my hand feebly. Then he held up his own hand to the light.

'It's there,' he said wearily, after a while. 'You want to be kind, but you can't make black white. That's what I've always said. It's the Will of God, and there's nothing to gain by fighting it. Black will be black, and white will be white till crack of doom.'

I told him sternly that I was going to fetch the doctor to him. He sprang at me and gripped my arm.

'I trusted you,' he said. 'I needn't have told you. You promised.'

So I had like a simpleton.

'Only give me two days,' he said, 'then I'll go to the doctor myself, if nothing works in all that time.'

So I said I would respect my promise loyally for those two days.

'I only told you,' he said, 'because my head was splitting with keeping it in. It's awful to me. I thought you were a negrophile and wouldn't think so much of it as other fellows. But for God's sake don't give me away to them. There's lots of things to try yet. By the way, ask that parson to pray for one afflicted and distressed in mind, body, and estate.'

He did try many sorts of things, poor fellow. He was in and out of that bath-room a good share of both days. He also tried drugs and patent medicines. I saw his cabin littered with them. He would sneak into meals those two days when people had almost finished, and gobble his food furtively.

I caught him once or twice smoking his pipe in the bath-room or the bath-room passage. He would not venture amid the crowd on deck. Only when many of the passengers were in bed would he come up with me, and take my arm and walk up and down. That was on the Wednesday night.

Wednesday night came, then Thursday morning. Thursday forenoon was long, and Thursday afternoon longer.

At last the sun was low, and I began to count the hours to the time when I might consult the doctor.

I secured an interview with Carraway in the bathroom soon after sunset.

'Any better?' I asked for about the twentieth time.

He shook his head dejectedly.

'All right. We must go to the doctor to-morrow morning. But, O Carraway, do go to him to-night, don't be afraid. It's only imagination. Do go.'

'I'll see,' he said in a dazed, dreary sort of way, 'I'll see, but I want to play the last card I have in my hand before I go. It's a trump card perhaps.'

'On my honor,' I said, 'You're tormenting yourself for nothing. You're as white as ever you were.'

Then I said 'Good-night.' I stopped for a moment outside the door, and heard him begin splashing and scrubbing. The thing was getting on my own nerves.

I went off up on deck, and smoked hard, then I read, and wrote letters, and smoked again, and went to bed very late. I had steered clear of the bathroom and all Carraway's haunts so far as I could. Yes, and I had gone over to the second class, and I had asked the parson to do as he wanted. I had asked him the day before. Now I asked him over again.

The steward handed me a letter when he brought me my coffee in the morning. I opened it and read:

DEAR SIR, Perhaps my negrophoby is wrong. Anyhow, it's real to me. I had and have it, and see no way to get rid of it properly here on earth. Now God has touched me, me the negrophobe, and colored me. And to me the thing seems very hard to bear. Therefore I am trying the sea to-night.

'In the bath-room there never seemed to be enough water. I want to try a bath with plenty of water. But I am afraid it may be with me as it would have been with Macbeth or Lady Macbeth. Those red hands of murder could not be washed white by the ocean, they could only "the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red." What if I cannot be decolorized by any sea? What if my flesh only pollutes the sea, when I plunge, and makes all black? God help me!!! You are a negrophile and don't half understand.

'Yours truly,

'J. CARRAWAY.'

I questioned the steward. He had found the letter in my place at table.

Sure enough there was a third-class passenger missing. I suppose Carraway had slipped off quietly in the moonlight to try his desperate experiment. It was a cruel business his monomania.

If I had broken my promise and called the doctor earlier, could he have been cured? Or would he have lingered in an asylum shuddering over the fictitious glooming of his nails and skin, shaking in a long ague of negrophoby.

Anyhow, I'm sorry I didn't do more for him, didn't walk him round the deck the last night at least, and try my best to cheer him. Yes, I blame myself badly for not doing that.

May God who allowed his delusion pardon that last maneuver of his! I do not think Carraway had any clear wish to take his own life.

I can imagine the scene so convincingly Carraway pausing, hesitating, then plunging into the moon-blanched water from the dizzy height above, eager to find which the multitudinous seas would do would they change his imagined color, or would they suddenly darken, matching in their tints his own discoloration?

AN OLD-WORLD SCRUPLE

'If you come back, which Heaven ordain, you'll be all the more use to the priesthood,' the Superintendent of Missions said. 'Go and serve with our fearless and faithful, approach as an acolyte the altar of freedom. Supposing you don't see your way to go, I would remind you of a certain passage about "Curse ye Meroz!" I need not insult your knowledge of the Scriptures by finishing my quotation.'

Osborne listened respectfully, but his eyes were looking far away, with dreams of the veld in them.

The Superintendent's preaching of a sort of Christian Jehad appealed to him infinitesimally.

There was a silence. He knocked his pipe out, and offered the Superintendent a sundowner.

'I'm glad to have had your opinion,' he said. 'I take it you don't want me just now as a candidate for ordination?'

The Superintendent flushed and hesitated.

'You mustn't put it like that,' he said almost irritably. 'The decision rests with you, of course. Of course we want men now and want them badly. Yet I wouldn't press my recruiting needs just now. It doesn't seem to me the right time to do so. Afterwards. . . . '

He gulped and spluttered as the big words rushed so fast to his lips.

He was enlarging on the big days for God's priesthood, when the war, please God, should be over. Big days, that is to say, if the only sort of fit and proper issue should be reached, as doubtless it would be before long.

'You mean a complete knock-out for the other side?' his hearer interpolated crudely.

'I mean a supreme vindication of our holy cause,' amended the Superintendent with conviction.

Then they changed the subject.

Afterwards, when they smoked late on the lamp-lit stoep, conversation was apt to flag a little. The layman's eyes would grow abstracted in the intervals of his ceremonious hospitality. The Superintendent watched his face intently once or twice. The man was a mystery to him. He had an uneasy sense that he had not taken his measure, and had been responsible for some sort of a misfit more than once in conversation. Why was he not more like ordinary people? Probably because he had lived a lonely life on the veld much too long. The Superintendent was conscious of a profound distrust of the untamed veld, its influence and its inhabitants. Yet his natural kindliness, reinforced assuredly by his grace of orders and Christian sense of duty, strove quite heroically against that distrust.

David Osborne walked over to see me next week, but he did not find me at home; I was camping with a native teacher's wagon some twenty miles away.

He slept at my place, and came on after me. A thirty miles' tramp or so it meant to overtake me, but he did not shrink from it. He wanted to think out things, and he liked foot-slogging on a big scale as a stimulus to thought. I was on a high ledge above the windings of the Sawi River when he found me a ledge with a great view of the Wedza hills. The sun was going down then, and their blue was just dying into purple. I got him some tea, and he drank and ate like a veldsman one who had broken his journey but little since he broke his morning fast. He told me the Superintendent's point of view, which I have already chronicled. 'It provides a certain amount of excuse,' Osborne said, 'for what I want to do. That's about all I can say for it.'

'Then you want to go?' I asked.

'I want a change,' he said, 'and adventures and all that. As to any war's being a holy war, that's Greek to me.' I smiled. I understood what he meant.

I had only just come back from a limited experience of war as a non-combatant. 'Why don't you say outright what you think?' he pressed me. 'The Superintendent does do that apparently, I'll say that much for him. Isn't Saint Telemachus still your bright particular star of Christian sainthood in wartime? And isn't Tolstoy still in your eyes a sort of forlorn hope the most hopeful of modern war-time philosophers? Or have you changed all that?'

I looked him straight in the eyes, considering.

'I have changed,' I said. He looked at me hopefully. He hadn't seen me since I had come back from the war. 'So the holy war's all right?' he asked. 'And the acolyte to the altar of freedom and all that sort of thing? I attach some importance to your opinion, remember, so don't say more than you mean. Having seen war, which do you plump for? Tolstoy, Saint Telemachus, or the Superintendent? Speak now, and kiss the Book on it.'

I would have liked to laugh, but I did not dare. He was in such desperate earnest. I answered: 'I have changed for the worse from the Superintendent's point of view. I am not the same as I was. I am more so.'

He went to the war. But he went with a share of Reuben's curse upon him. He wrote to me quite frankly from his East African camps about the things that appealed to him, and the other things. His experience seemed to bear out my own, for the most part. He considered that some deplorable things had been done on both sides, and also some very fine things. But as to the efficacy of the machine guns he ministered to, in promoting the Kingdom of God, he was under no illusions. He was possibly disposed to exaggerate things, e.g., the vitiating influence of war upon life about one. He was certainly disposed, I think, to exaggerate his own coarsening, as a not very reputable campaign proceeded. He harped somewhat morbidly on one particular strain in his letters. How much better, he surmised, it would be for Christianity and civilization if he and others like him should never return to resume their places in Christian society! Some verses that he sent me when he was under orders to join a rather hazardous expedition, have, I believe, a certain sincerity in their ruggedness. They are not very cheerful, are they?

They have a note attached to them. N.B. We had Church parade this morning, and the lesson was about Nebuchadnezzar's going into retreat.

LYCANTHROPY.

They drove him forth as beast and not as man Till seven times had pass'd. At last he came Back to his Babylon, but not the same. Nay! For he now had learn'd of Lips on high, Herded with cattle, 'neath a dewy sky, How patience cannot fail where passion can. But we, war's wehr-wolves, we than wolves more fain.

(Grace-harden'd, deaf to Gospel, blind to Rood), Fain to seek night-long horrors of the wood Where the blood-trail is red, the blood-scent hot, Shall we return in time? God, were it not Best for Thy world we should not come again?

But he was to come again, for all his reluctance and shrinking from a return. He was to come through that campaign all right, and back to our part of Africa that he loved so dearly.

'We shall have him back, I hope, before the end of this month,' the Superintendent of Missions told me. 'The Bishop seems willing to ordain him before Christmas. He's not likely to need a long diaconate, is he? Our Bishop agrees with me that he's had just the kind of training for his priesthood that was most to be desired.' I nodded dubiously.

We were sitting in the Superintendent's well-ordered study, which he preferred to call his office. Its big window took a discreet peep at the veld, but it was not the untamed veld, only Rosebery Commonage. I searched in my pockets, and after uneasy gropings, unearthed a crumpled letter begrimed and tobacco-dusty. 'This doesn't look much like his coming up for ordination,' I said. I read an extract: 'Please give that Chinde boy in the College at Cape Town a message from me. I was glad to hear from you how well he was doing. I always liked that boy extraordinarily, and I think I had a sort of glimmer of his pastoral destiny quite early, soon after he came our way as a straying sheep. Now, from what you say, he bids fair to be a quite respectable candidate for the native ministry. Will you please offer him two or three more years at the College to enable him to qualify, should that be his own wish. I am quite prepared to be at charges for him. It's a happy augury that his baptismal name happens to be Solomon, even as it was rather a tragic one that mine happened to be David. I don't see my way to building up God's House on the old farm now, either literally or metaphorically, in the way a priest should.

I look on your boy at Cape Town as a likely substitute. Vicariously I hope to offer by his hands, since mine are now too stained to offer to my own satisfaction. I'll do David's part, please God, and help him to build up the House, in both senses, the house I might have built with my own hands, had they been otherwise occupied than they have been these last months. I am quite resigned now. It is all for the best, doubtless.'

'What does he mean?' The Superintendent's rather assured face grew quite indeterminate and puzzled.

'What he says, probably,' I hazarded. 'He's got a scruple an old-world scruple.'

I picked up the Superintendent's khaki-covered Bible, and turned over hastily the red, blue, and white edges.

'Here's the passage,' I said. 'Listen to what his namesake, the other David, said: "But God said unto me, 'Thou shalt not build an house for My Name, because thou hast been a man of war, and hast shed blood."'

'Oh, that text!' said the Superintendent not very reverentially. 'I don't think that it's particularly relevant.'

'Isn't it what he thinks that matters?' I asked. 'No, make your mind up to it. When he followed your own advice and went off to the war, he decided. He decided to remain a layman to the end of his earthly days. Some of us have got our scruples. His took shape that way.'

'I don't see why,' said the Superintendent rather piteously. He was genuinely disappointed. I liked him for the unconscious tribute he was paying to him whom we discussed.

'Be consoled,' I said with a twinkle. 'His farm promises to be a real lay centre of Christian influence. May we not rest assured of that? Trust him to encourage native industries and native ideas; Trust him to believe in the veld. Trust him to read to his veld-dwellers the Sermon on the Mount; trust him to live it rather. Trust him to deprecate, by example, as well as precept, excessive care for food and raiment. Our missions are apt to be rather over-ecclesiastical, aren't they? Far too much of an urban and Europeanized type, don't you think? Be consoled, his lay settlement may be trusted to teach us a lot. God grant that his native priest-designate he has chosen to be his Solomon, may soon come along! Be consoled!'

The Superintendent looked slightly aghast. 'I don't see where the consolation comes in,' he groaned.

FOR HIS COUNTRY'S GOOD

Percy Benson opened his eyes and looked around him. He was lying in a tiny grass-hut. How did he get there? He thought for a while slowly; his head was very hot and heavy.

Of course! This must be one of the hoppers' houses, and he had got back into Kent or East Sussex somehow. Where had he been lately? Not in Kent, or even in England. He could remember only a confused medley of traveling by land and water, and a huge home-sickness. Never mind, all's well that ends well. Here he was back in Kent surely, and in a hoppers' house. What time of year was it? That rather puzzled him. For was not that a mass of cherry-blossom not twenty yards from the tiny doorway? Why should they put up a hoppers' house before September? Why in the world should they put it up when cherries were in flower?

Never mind, he was in Kent; he would sleep ever so much better now for knowing that. He put the cup of water that he found beside him to his lips. Then he closed his eyes and slept anew. When he woke again, hours after, a big man in flannel shirt and wide-brimmed grey hat was standing by a wood fire outside the doorway. It seemed to be just growing dark. The man was cooking something in a pan over the fire. As he turned, Benson knew his face. This was his old school and City friend John Haslar. He had not seen him for years he could not remember how many.

'Hullo, Jack!' he said.

'Hullo!' said John with a start. 'That's much better. You've slept well this last time! How do you feel now?'

'Oh, better, much better,' said Benson. 'But I've had it badly. Influenza, isn't it?'

John looked at him with a question in his eyes, but did not answer. 'I think you'll do now,' he said. 'You must take some nourishment and your medicine, and then try to sleep again. I'm your man for a talk in the morning, if only you get a good night. I didn't come eighty miles to see you for nothing, I can tell you.'

Benson felt weak and weary, and did as he was told. Just as he closed his eyes he said, 'I'm glad to be back in Kent ever so glad.' He sighed a little sigh of relief. 'I can't think where I've been all this time. I am really back again, am I not?' He did not wait for an answer, but fell asleep.

He woke up once in the night, and saw John sitting by the fire and smoking his pipe.

"This is a hoppers' house, isn't it?" he began.

John turned round and looked at him with interest and pity. 'It looks very much like it,' he said.

Benson gave a contented sigh, and turned over on his side again.

When he awoke in the morning his strength was really beginning to come again. He was hungry for breakfast. He caught sight of a dark, tall form by the fire on waking. But a minute or two after it was gone, and John was back again.

'Ready for breakfast?' he asked.

Benson was soon at his porridge, and debating as to whether he should finish with eggs or chops.

'You'd better have what you really care for,' said John, and stepped outside and gave a call.

'Who's that gypsy-looking fellow?' asked Benson.

'Oh, he helps me,' said John. 'He's all right.' He went out of the hut and received a dish from somebody as he spoke.

It was after breakfast that Benson made a request. 'I believe I know where I am,' he said. 'Though I'm not quite sure, because my head's still dizzy. I believe I'm back again in High Wood, just near Hawkenbury, not two miles from my old home. What do you think?'

'I don't think I know that country,' said John, looking uncomfortable. 'And I'm sure I've never been here before.'

'I remember,' Percy Benson said, 'there used to be a little grocer's shop down in Hawkenbury Street, where they sold mixed biscuits, with lots of pink and white and yellow sugar, and glass-stoppered ginger-beer. I haven't forgotten the taste, though it's years ago. Do you think you could go down there, or send somebody, and get me a bottle of ginger-beer and a pound of biscuits. They're just what I'd fancy.'

John looked doubtful. 'I know a place that isn't so very far off, where they keep groceries,' he said. 'But I don't know whether they keep ginger-beer in glass-stoppered bottles, or if they keep that particular sort of biscuits. However, we'll try.'

Benson slept a good deal that day. He talked between whiles rather feverishly about the place, and how glad he was to be back there again. John said very little, but that seemed not to matter. Benson was glad enough to ramble on and on. He did not appear to take much notice whether you answered his questions or not. He was ecstatic rather than curious.

The biscuits came and were a fair success.

'Not quite so good as they used to be, but very good,' said Benson. 'I like these sugar ones immensely; the ones with the pink sugar are the pick.' But the ginger-beer was not of the time-honored brand. It was drinkable enough, but it had a cork tied, instead of a long cool mouth with a glass stopper.

'I must walk down and do some shopping for myself to-morrow,' Benson said. 'What a summer we're having. Did you ever see such blue sky as we've had yesterday and to-day?'

Next morning he was much better, and could get up and walk about a little. John looked uncomfortable at times, as they sat over their breakfast by the fire under the great trees. He was trying to make up his mind to tell his friend where he was, and to recall what had happened to him. He could see that, now the fever-mists were melting, he was likely to be remembering for himself before long. But how could he break things to him easily without giving him a dire shock in his worn-out state?

Then to him pondering, the crisis came of itself.

Suddenly out of the woodland stepped a party of natives with monkey-nuts, sweet potatoes, and other wares, very cheery and smiling.

Benson started and his eyes grew troubled. 'Is this Africa?' he said. 'Then I'm not home after all not home after all.'

'You're in Africa,' said John. 'You came up here about three months ago, so they told me.'

'I remember,' said Benson. 'There was some money trouble in the City some bad trouble. Then I had to leave my little place in Kent near Seven-oaks, just as I was getting it to rights.' He looked miserable as he thought over things, this sallow little City man.

Meanwhile John traded some monkey-nuts and sweet potatoes for salt, and sent the traffickers away.

Afterwards Benson began to talk out of the bitterness of his soul, and John lit his pipe and listened gravely. He talked about his little estate near Sevenoaks, the cottages and the farm, the Elizabethan manor-house, the school and church, the timber and the planting of the new trees. 'I was just getting the place into shape,' he said. And then he nearly broke down and cried as he told about the trouble in the City, and how a family council had been called, and he had agreed to go to this country for his country's good, and to keep away. 'Oh this farm, as they call it,' he said 'these thousands of acres of grass and rocks with a tin shanty to die of fever in! How wretched I've been here! But we aren't on the farm still, are we? This seems a bit better. It regularly took me in, this place. I did really think I was in Kent again.'

John knocked out his pipe solemnly, and was just going to try and say something comforting.

But Benson began again. 'And how did you get here you, the only friend I've got in this wretched country?'

John told him that he had come down to see him, when he did, without knowing how ill he was. He had had a letter from him, at his store up in Rosebery last month, and for old sakes' sake he had driven down when he had a chance to come away. When he reached the farm he had found Benson lying at his homestead unconscious from fever. The natives who were waiting on him seemed to think him in danger. They said he had been sick for days. John had gone to bed early that night of his coming to the farm a glorious moonlit night. But long before dawn he had been roused by a Kaffir boy with the news that Benson had risen and rushed out. They tracked his wanderings to that beautiful stretch of woodland, and managed to house him in a garden-hut of grass, close by a clearing among the trees. Either John or his native boy kept watch over him day and night then. But when he awoke with that happy fancy of being at home, John kept away the native boy, and put away, as far as he could, all the distinctive signs of Africa. That dream of being at home might be a real help in tiding his friend over a very wretched time. There he camped under the two great trees with the wild white-flowered bush so like an English cherry-tree in full September bloom about him, and wondered what the issue of that comfortable delusion of Benson's would be. It could not be expected to last anyhow, now that he was coming back to sense and strength.

Benson writhed as John finished his story. He went on with the tale of his own black loneliness and grey home-sickness. The glory of Kent and the charm of High Wood seemed to be gone like the shadows of a dream already. What good had they done him after all?

John felt miserable as he heard him out. 'Look here!' he said, 'I've been doing well at the store, and I've got a good many cattle that I'd like to run on this farm, if we can come to terms; and I'll try and drive down every month or other month, and stay with you for a bit and see how they're getting on.'

Percy Benson's face grew bright again at that saying. He was very weak, and prone to sudden ups and downs.

'Oh, do promise you'll come every month,' he said. 'Weeks are so long, and the one mail-day a week comes always terribly slowly. Do promise.'

John promised faithfully.

Next day they went back to the homestead, a dull little iron building on a rather feverish site. 'If I were you,' said John, 'I'd build where you have been lying sick. I don't like the look of this other place at all.'

'Yes, I shall build in High Wood; I want to call it so now. It's a magical place, I think: I shall always feel something is home-like when I'm there.'

Life was growing brighter to him. His fever-fancy had opened his eyes a little to the charm of the new country it was, at least, here and there, not unlike the old country.

'I think I shall fancy this place more now,' he said to John on the morning they parted. 'But, oh, if you could only have seen that little place of mine five miles from Sevenoaks!'

'Look here!' said John. 'You've got a bigger estate here than ever you had there, and you can find the same sort of interests in it. Study your Kaffir tenants, and help them with ideas about stock and ploughing and church and school. Your neighbors don't. Well, more simpletons and arrant wasters, they! Believe me, you'll find the new life much more like the old life in Kent, if you do. Then study tree-planting, and look after this grand old native timber. Expect me next month, on the 23rd.'

He went away and left Benson lonely. But the real blackness of his loneliness was gone. The planning of the new homestead would keep him busy for a long while now. Was not healing virtue exuding from that soil, which the happy dreams of his recovery had consecrated? His fever had given him a new point of view, or rather given him back his old Kentish point of view delight in God's own country sights and scenes, care for his tenants, and hope.

LE ROI EST MORT

The railway had almost crept up to Alexandra Then--the seventy-three miles of its sandy pilgrimage were all but complete. In three months or so it would be open to those who could afford their penny a mile no, but I am forgetting, on the privileged group to which it belongs no European may travel third-class.

I did not welcome that railway with any warmth. The district that it tapped had seemed to me a camping-ground of refuge, as civilization pressed on. That district was a haven for the Kaffir-trader, a haven for the transport-rider, a haven too for the foot-slogging missionary, like myself. We have our faults, all three doubtless, and deserve the spurning of civilization's iron feet, when our time comes, doubtless. On the other hand our displacement is a matter for some sympathy, it is likely to hurt like other displacements. Also we are prone to note that the admirable iron feet of our displacer are not unmixed with baser clay.

I came to Shumba Siding last Eastertide, on my way to Alexandra. Charles Miller was there in charge of the line, and he offered me a thirty-one mile ride in to within two miles of town if I would only wait for a construction train. I declined in my stupid sentimentality. For one thing I hate breaking up a plan of combined foot-travel; it seems to me hard on one's native fellow-travelers, on whom one is apt to call for big efforts. To ride on ahead, and leave them struggling alone with the sandy monster of a road for any long distance, seems vile desertion, and I was by no means sure that the invitation to board the train included them. Moreover, this might be my last journey in, on the old road, under the old order.

So I declined, but I lunched with Charles Miller Before I went on. Marvell was there, the Kaffir store-keeper from ten miles away. He had much to tell me of his wonderful good luck. The big firm that were putting up the new Store at Alexandra, that rail-head terminus designate, had asked him to manage it.

He could marry now on his prospects. He had wanted to see me, and had waylaid me on my road. The bride was due by coach to-morrow. He hoped to get a Special License when once she had arrived. Would I marry them on Monday?