Kafir Stories
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William Charles Scully >> Kafir Stories
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Shortly afterwards the shrubbery was full of blanched faces, rendered
doubly ghastly by the faint glimmer of the lanterns and candles. Samuel
was there, taciturn as usual, and the most self-possessed person
present. He came direct from his room when the alarm was given. Miss
Blake was led by Mrs. Schultz into the house. Then hands, tremulous
with terror and pity, lifted tenderly what had so recently been a human
being brimming with youthful, healthy life, and exalted with
anticipation of the crown of happy love, and laid it on the little
white bed. Later, when the officials came to view the body, they opened
the door softly and shrinkingly, and the drip, drip, drip on the clay
floor sounded on their tense brains like strokes from the hammer of
doom.
When Martha Kawa had sufficiently recovered to be capable of answering
questions, she told a strange story. She had heard, so she said, a
voice raised as though in anger, but had been unable to distinguish the
words, and just afterwards a dull thud. She then walked quickly towards
where these sounds had come from, and was just able to distinguish two
men running away. This was all that could be elicited from her.
Suspicion at once fell upon Samuel. In his room was found a large
knobbed stick, such as might have caused the wound, with the knob still
damp, apparently from recent washing. Foot-marks corresponding with
his were found in suspicious localities in the shrubbery. He was
arrested and tried for the crime, but was acquitted on the evidence of
Martha Kawa. When, shortly after the trial, Samuel and Martha
disappeared simultaneously, every one felt that Samuel was surely
guilty, and that his acquittal, which was irrevocable, had involved a
terrible miscarriage of justice.
Miss Blake left the mission and returned to her family. Mr. Schultz
shortly afterwards retired from active work, and went to live in one of
the larger colonial towns. He drew a small pension which, with the
interest upon the scanty savings of his charitable life, was sufficient
for his moderate needs. He still holds by the fundamental axiom.
VI.
About three years after the tragedy just related, a native man and
woman lived together in a lonely hut close to the mouth of the Bashee
river, They were clad in the savage garb common to the uncivilised
natives. The woman was of a much lighter complexion than the man, and
she carried, slung on her back, an emaciated child with a badly
deformed spine. On her face and body were many scars, most of them
healed up, but some still raw, and evidently of recent infliction.
Samuel Gozani and Martha Kawa had wandered far since leaving the
mission. They had gone together to the kraal of the headman, Samuel's
father, in Gealekaland, but Samuel's violent temper had led to his
being driven away. His father gave him a few goats, and his other
relations told him to depart and return no more. So he and Martha built
a hut far from other men, and cultivated a small field of maize,
millet, and pumpkins. Samuel's temper grew worse under the stress of
his solitary life, and Martha suffered much from his ill-treatment.
Shortly after an act of particularly brutal violence on his part she
was confined, and the poor little baby, a boy, was found to be
hopelessly deformed. According to native custom, such a child would
have been destroyed, but when Samuel suggested this, the mother blazed
out into such wrath that he did not refer to the subject again. It soon
became apparent that Samuel--sometimes, at least--was insane. He
seemed hardly ever to sleep, and he remained days without speaking, One
day, on entering the hut, he savagely kicked the child, which was lying
on a mat just inside the door, to one side. The poor little thing set
up a thin, piteous squeal, which, when the mother heard it, roused her
to a pitch of tiger-like fury. She rushed at Samuel and flung him
backwards out of the door. Incensed to madness, he sprang at her,
dashed her down on the floor, and held her with his hands at her
throat, and his knees pressing violently on her stomach. He held her
thus for some seconds, then sprang up, rushed out of the hut, and
disappeared into the bush.
The wretched woman lay senseless for some time, and when she regained
consciousness she felt that she had sustained some serious internal
injury. It was early in the forenoon when the deed was done, and in the
afternoon her body began to swell, and she suffered violent pain. She
had, as a matter of fact, sustained a severe internal rupture. She
managed to crawl over to where the child lay, still wailing, and she
gave it the breast to still it. Then she began to suffer from violent
thirst, but there was neither water nor milk in the hut. Owing to
Samuel's bad reputation no one ever came to his dwelling, and thus
Martha had no chance of succour before his return, which she now longed
for. The sun went down, and she lay in agony, watching the dying
daylight. She lay through the long, slow hours of the night, unable co
move, and with the poor little child tugging at her in vain, and
fitfully wailing from hunger and cold, for the fire had long since gone
out. When morning broke she became delirious; later on she became
unconscious, and remained so all day. When Samuel returned at sundown,
driving home the little flock of goats, she appeared to be at the last
gasp. He was, to do him justice, much shocked at what he saw. Samuel at
once ran down to the river and fetched some water, a little of which,
poured down Martha's parched throat, restored her to consciousness. He
lit a fire and sat down near her, giving her a sip of water now and
then. He even wrapped the child up in a tanned calf skin, and then went
out and caught a she-goat, which he flung to the ground, and tied by
its extended legs to two poles of the hut, which were about six feet
apart. He then placed the chilled and starving child where it could
suck one of the teats. The goat struggled and withheld its milk, but
Samuel held it down and kneaded the udder until the draught came, and
the child drank long and deeply.
When the mother saw this, she smiled faintly, and just afterwards she
fell quietly asleep. The child also slept, so Samuel released the goat
and returned to his seat.
The fire flickered up and showed by fits and starts the inside of the
hut. There lay the dying woman, her deathlike face drawn and haggard
from her long agony, breathing very shortly, the beginning of the death
rattle being audible. There lay the child, half covered by the skin,
its lips parted in the ghastly semblance of a smile which was due to
the indigestion caused by a heavy meal of unusual food, and there sat
Samuel with wide open eyes, looking down into the fire without seeing
it.
Outside the stars glittered down through the cool June air upon the
lovely valley, rich in forest and flanked by gently-swelling, grassy
hills. The tinkling murmur of the river which, after rainless months,
had shrunk to the dimensions of a streamlet, except in the long, deep
reaches, stole up from where it ran, crystal clear, over a low, rocky
bar.
Suddenly Martha opened her eyes and spoke in a thin, far-away voice--
"Samuel."
He started, and, moving to where she lay, bent over her.
"Samuel," she said, "I am dying--now! now!" (She spoke English, a
thing neither of them had done since they had left the mission.)
"Perhaps it is true--what they used to teach us--perhaps Jesus did die
for us.--Samuel--I love you--and you have killed me--but if I find--
Jesus--I will ask--him--to let you come!"
She gasped, and stopped speaking, and just then the child woke up and
wailed. This seemed to electrify her.
"Oh, God! the child!" she screamed. "Give him to me!"
Samuel arose, gently lifted the wailing baby, and laid it on her left
side, between her arm and her body, with its head on her shoulder.
"Samuel--Samuel," she gasped, "I lied--to save--you. It is--your--
child. We have been--bad--but Jesus--will forgive. He will--forgive--us
both--if you--take care----"
Here her breath failed, and she struggled painfully to speak, her eyes
becoming dim and bright by turns. She tried to lift her right hand, but
could not, so she turned it on its back and beckoned with the
forefinger. Samuel gently laid his hand in hers, and she slowly
grasped his fingers. She lay still like this for a time; hardly
breathing, and with that strange, fitful gleam coming back at longer
intervals to her dimming eyes. Suddenly her eyes flashed almost
fiercely, and, with what must have been a terrible effort, she drew his
hand across her body until it rested on the child's head. She held it
there until she died.
In the morning Samuel again caught the she-goat, carried it into the
hut, laid it down, and bound its legs as he had previously done. But
the child would not drink. About midday the poor little thing began to
scream violently, and at sundown it died in strong convulsions, Samuel
holding it tenderly in his arms.
At midnight Samuel buried the two bodies together in a shallow grave,
over which he piled a quantity of heavy stones to keep off the jackals.
He then went to the little kraal where the goats were kept, and pulled
away the bush which served as a gate, thus leaving the entrance open.
He then divested himself of every article of clothing and ornament, and
placed them in the hut. The fire had gone out, but, after raking about
deep down in the pile of ashes, he found a few embers still alight.
These he placed carefully on a bent wisp of dry grass which he pulled
out of the roof, and which blazed up in a few seconds. He then set fire
to the hut in several places, and went outside. In a few minutes the
hut, being built of wattles and grass, all now as dry as tinder, blazed
up. Samuel stood and watched the fire until the last flame flickered
out. He then turned his back on the heap of glowing embers, and walked
away in the direction of the river.
There is a deep pool in the river a few hundred yards from the spot
where Samuel's hut used to stand, and at one side of it the bank rises
precipitously for about twenty feet. Upon this bank stood Samuel
Gozani, naked as he was born, and he lifted up his voice and spake:
"The white men told me about a God that died for all men, and that
rewards the good and punishes the wicked, but the white man lied about
other things, so I cannot believe him. My father told me about
Tikoloshe, who lives in the water, and pulls people down by the feet
into the darkness. I never knew my father to lie; I want to reach the
darkness, so I will go to Tikoloshe."
He sprang into the pool, and Tikoloshe pulled him down by the feet into
the darkness.
KELLSON'S NEMESIS.
"Take Sin's empty goblet, fling it
Hurtling from some sheer cliff's height,
Winds will bear it up and wing it
Back to thee in devious flight.
Smash it against the rocks--before thee
Laming fragments strew thy path.
Swamp it deep--the waves restore thee
What thou gav'st them, brimmed with wrath."
SHAGBAG'S Soliloquy on the Boomerang.
Night had fallen, although the red glow had not yet quite faded out of
the west, when John Jukes Kellson, the newly appointed Civil
Commissioner and Resident Magistrate of Marsonton, drove down the hill
into the village in which he would henceforth reside and exercise his
official functions. The cart drawn by four horses, which conveyed him,
had been hired at a town over ninety miles away, and Kellson had driven
that distance in two broiling hot days. As the cart went slowly down
the hill, the moon was rising over the eastern mountains, and a
breathless stillness reigned, broken only by the rumble of the vehicle.
How familiar it all was; he knew every curve of the road and every
ant-heap; every bush looming in the twilight seemed like an old
acquaintance. Nineteen years had passed since Kellson had last seen the
village. A clerk in the local public offices, he had left it on
promotion, and now he was returning as chief Government functionary.
How strange it seemed.
The cart reached the hotel and stopped before the front door. It was
Sunday night. Having a constitutional distaste for public functions of
all kinds, outside the established official routine, Kellson had
purposely left the inhabitants of the village and district in the dark
as to the date of his intended arrival, so as to avoid the agonies of a
public reception, involving an address and a reply, both couched in the
irritating platitudinous phraseology deemed indispensable on such
occasions.
He entered the hotel at which he had formerly boarded and lodged for
several years as a bachelor. The faces he saw were all strange, but the
building was just the same. It was evident that neither the doors, the
windows, nor the verandah had been renewed since he had seen the place
last. The same atmosphere of mustiness permeated the premises; the
ill-laid flags forming the floor of the stoep still with lifted edges lay
in wait for unaccustomed feet. He knew those flags, and the old habit
of stepping high when he walked on them returned. He even remembered,
as he walked along, the places where it was safe to tread and those to
be avoided.
The servant showed him to his room, the same he had occupied twenty
years ago. Twenty years; good God! what a long time. He was then
twenty-six years old--and now. How many things had happened in those
years. The servant lit the candle, and Kellson looked round the room.
Yes; just as he had expected; there was the same furniture. The
wall-paper was different, that was all. He passed his hand over the foot of
the iron bedstead and drew out one of the slides of the old, rickety
chest of drawers. How many people had slept in that bed since that
morning when he had here packed his portmanteau before carrying it out
to the post-cart.
He went to supper, and recognised familiar objects at every turn. These
recognitions hurt him so much that he could hardly keep from crying
out. He feared to lift his eyes lest he should see some old
acquaintance in the shape of a fly-blown picture grinning at him. The
proprietor of the hotel and his family were all absent at church, and
for this small mercy Kellson was devoutly thankful. Supper over, he
strolled out into the silent village street. He could not, however,
endure the sensations which he experienced, so he hurried back to his
room. The transfiguring moonlight had conjured up the ghost of his
youth, and it mocked and gibed at him cruelly.
Kellson was a bad sleeper, but he went to bed early so as to rest his
weary limbs. He lit his pipe, and then tried to read, but the mists of
nineteen years gathered between his eyes and the page, so he blew out
the candle and lay still with his eyes wide open and no thought of
sleep. The whole weight of the past seemed to press on and crush him,
whilst the stress of the present prevented his dropping the load and
resting. Moreover, numbers of those wretched cur dogs that swarm in
most South African villages were now barking in all directions, the
full moon and the warm night drawing out more than the usual
contingent.
Kellson's official residence was on a hill just beyond the other end of
the village, and he determined, without waiting for the arrival of the
waggons with his effects, to buy next day enough furniture for one
small bedroom which he would occupy, still taking his meals at the
hotel. He would thus be away from the horrible dogs. He meant to board
at the hotel until the arrival of his wife. His wife t why must he
think of her with such bitterness? Why must he look forward to her
return from her trip to Europe with uneasiness and dissatisfaction? It
was the old story--incompatibility of temper, or rather of temperament.
He had married at the age of thirty-eight, nine years ago. His wife was
now twenty-eight. She was one of those women who can be got at only
through their feelings--never through their reason. In her a passionate
longing for motherhood had absorbed every other wish. She had money of
her own and had gone to spend a year in Europe. When she left, Kellson
experienced a deep sense of relief; a whole year's freedom seemed
endless at the beginning, but now two-thirds of the time had gone by
swiftly, and in about four months she would be back. How he dreaded her
return and the recommencement of the old discordant life. Kellson was,
no doubt, in some respects a difficult man to live with, but he
nevertheless would have made a reasonable, sympathetic woman moderately
happy. His habit was to act reasonably according to his lights in all
his daily relations, both official and domestic. His wife was an
extremely emotional person, who could be persuaded to do a thing, or
leave it undone, as the case might be, by arguments based upon
conventionalism or generosity, but never by those drawn from justice or
reasonableness. Kellson had at first set himself the task of showing
her the saving graces of reasonableness, but he soon gave the attempt
up in disgust. But things would have come all right between them had
there only been a child.
Kellson had not been a successful man. At the beginning, his career
promised well. Fifteen years previously he had been ahead of most men
of his own term of service, but now others--some of them considerably
his juniors--had forged past him. He had noticed all his life that he
seldom carried any important enterprise to a successful conclusion. Up
to a certain point, he usually achieved rapid success, but then
difficulties unseen before arose one after the other, and failure, or
else only success very much qualified, resulted. He had often
endeavoured to find out the reason of this, but had not been able to do
so. He came to the conclusion that there was some weak strand in the
fibre of his character, but where this lay, or how to strengthen it, he
was unable to discover or devise.
His transfer to Marsonton, although it involved no curtailment of
salary, was really a reduction in point of status. At his last station
he had taken a. stand upon a matter in which the prejudices of a large
and influential class had been against him. The Government considered
he had been injudicious, and transferred him. He did not much mind; all
that troubled him, was the nuisance involved in packing up and moving
his books and furniture. His conscience was quite clear; he had done
what he thought: to be his duty. Yet he was honest enough to admit that
however right the abstract principle was, its application in the
particular circumstances involved may have been injudicious. His ideal
of official responsibility was a very high one, and during the whole
twenty-seven years of his service he had never done a shady thing;
neither had he ever allowed fear of the consequences to deter him from
pursuing what he considered to be the right course.
All things come to an end, and so did that Sunday night which Kellson
spent at the hotel. In the early morning he took a brighter view of
things. After breakfast he went up to the Public Offices, and, to the
astonishment of the clerks, introduced himself as their new chief. He
had not mentioned who he was at the hotel, and consequently no one knew
of his arrival. It being Monday, there was a heavy roll of cases for
trial, and when the one attorney and the two agents saw Kellson take
the bench, they were much chagrined at having been done out of the
pleasure of presenting the usual florid address.
Of the criminal cases to be heard, only one was of any importance,
namely that of a young coloured man charged with burglary. His name was
John Erlank. He had evidently more of European than of any other blood
in his veins; his hair was straight and black, and his complexion light
yellow. But the most striking thing about him was the beauty of his
eyes. They were black, large and deep. Although clearly showing signs
of vice and dissipation, there was something prepossessing in his
appearance; a kind of natural refinement was visible through his
evident degradation and in spite of his obviously cringing manner.
Kellson could not imagine whose face it was that the prisoner's
suggested. Although little more than a lad, Erlank had a bad record.
From early youth upwards he had been a criminal, and several
convictions for different crimes were now formally proved against him.
He had in this particular instance been committed to take his trial
before the circuit judge by the previous magistrate, before whom he had
fully admitted his guilt, but the Attorney General had now remitted the
case hack to the magistrate's court for disposal under the "Extended
Jurisdiction Act." Guilt being fully admitted by the prisoner, all
Kellson had to do as magistrate was to read over the depositions and
pass sentence. He considered the case to be one in which severity was
due, so after telling the man he was one on whom exhortation or advice
would be thrown away, he passed the highest sentence allowed by law,
that is two years' imprisonment with hard labour and a flogging of
thirty-six lashes. It was characteristic of Kellson that the prisoner's
prepossessing appearance had the involuntary effect of making the
sentence more severe, or rather, perhaps, of making the magistrate more
stern in his estimate of the criminality.
At about four o'clock, Kellson had disposed of all the cases, and was
thus free for the rest of the afternoon, so he left the office and
walked up towards his official residence. He had asked the Chief
Constable to see to the fitting up of his room, and he now went to look
over the premises. For a long time he was unable to dismiss the face of
the prisoner Erlank from his memory, it seemed to be almost as familiar
to him as the houses of the street along which he was walking.
The village had hardly changed since he had last seen it. It is one of
those places that do not grow because they happen not to be on any one
of the great highways to the North. One or two old fogeys came up and
greeted Kellson in the street--men he had known well in the old days,
now so changed as to be almost unrecognisable. He passed the little
room which had been used in the old days as a public library and
reading-room. It was now shut up, and almost in ruins. He thought of
how he used to run over from the office and flirt with the librarian, a
very pretty girl, long since married. He passed another house and
caught his breath short. It was that in which she had lived--the girl
he had loved in his youth, and who had loved him. He had left her in a
state of uncertainty as to his intentions, and after keeping up a warm
correspondence for some time, they had gradually become estranged, the
estrangement commencing on his side. Why had he acted like this, he
asked himself bitterly. He had dreaded something or another, he could
not quite define what it was. He remembered how she, who had been as
Steel to others, was like wax in his hands. He remembered----Ah, God
what a lot he remembered.
He arrived at the residency after walking up the hill. The exercise
made him puff. In the old days he used to run up steeper gradients, now
it sometimes distressed him to walk on level ground.
The gate and the fence were new, but the verandah, the door and the
windows, as in the case of the hotel, were the same he had known in the
old days. He opened the door and walked in, his footsteps sounding
hollow in the empty house.
Kellson stood in the passage. He had left the front door wide open so
as to admit the light. The air of the empty house seemed dense with the
essence of the past. He went into every room, pausing for a few seconds
in each, and then entering the next on tip-toe. He stood in the
dining-room, before the fireplace. He had sat where he now stood on so many
evenings of winter days whose suns had set with his youth. The barren
hearth was full of ghostly flames which struck a chill into his heart.
There was the room opening to the left, which Mabel and Vi, the little
twin daughters of his former chief, used to occupy. He seemed to hear
the laughter of the children echoing from some far-off paradise of the
past, before the portal of which a stern-browed Fate stood to prevent
his entering. The shutters of the dining-room window had been thrown
open. A memory-ghost prompted him to unfold one of them. On its inner
surface, painted over, he found the heads of the tacks with which he
had nailed the programme of the farewell dance given in honour of his
promotion by his chief. Where were the dancers? Gone like the music to
which their feet had kept time.
His bed had been placed in the room formerly occupied by the children.
This pleased him; the ghosts of Mabel and Vi were more bearable than
the other ghosts. He looked in to see that all he required had been
provided, and then he walked over the premises outside, old
recollections smiting him like whips at every turn. He went into the
stable and touched the ring to which "Bob," an old pony, the joint
property of the two little girls, used to be tied. The tennis-ground
was over-grown with grass--his predecessor's family evidently had not
cared about tennis. He recognised most of the trees in the garden. The
old vine at the side of the house was green and full of unripe grapes.
It was the only thing that had a cheerful look.
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