Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (680 page)

“I am afraid I’m rather singular,” he replied. “Most of us hate the Karroo. I used to, but it grows on one somehow. I suppose it’s the lack of fences and roads that’s so fascinating. And when one gets back from the railway —  — ”

“You’re quite right,” she said, with an emphatic stamp of her foot. “People come to Matjesfontein — ugh! — with their lungs, and they live opposite the railway station and that new hotel, and they think
that’s
the Karroo. They say there isn’t anything in it. It’s
full
of life when you really get into it. You see that? I’m
so
glad. D’you know, you’re the first English officer I’ve heard who has spoken a good word for my country?”

“I’m glad I pleased you,” said the Captain, looking into Sister Margaret’s black-lashed grey eyes under the heavy brown hair shot with grey where it rolled back from the tanned forehead. This kind of nurse was new in his experience. The average Sister did not lightly stride over rolling stones, and — was it possible that her easy pace up-hill was beginning to pump him? As she walked, she hummed joyously to herself, a queer catchy tune of one line several times repeated

Vat jou goet en trek, Ferriera,
Vat jou goet en trek.

It ran off with a little trill that sounded like:

Zwaar drag, alle en de ein kant;
Jannie met de hoepel bein!
¹

“Listen!” she said, suddenly. “What was that?”

“It must be a wagon on the road. I heard the whip, I think.”

“Yes, but you didn’t hear the wheels, did you? It’s a little bird that makes just that noise, ‘Whe-ew’!” she duplicated it perfectly. “We call it” — she gave the Dutch name, which did not, of course, abide with the Captain. “We must have given him a scare! You hear him in the early mornings when you are sleeping in the wagons. It’s just like the noise of a whip-lash, isn’t it?”

They entered the Major’s tent a little behind the others, who were discussing the scanty news of the Campaign.

“Oh, no,” said Sister Margaret coolly, bending over the spirit-lamp, “the Transvaalers will stay round Kimberley and try to put Rhodes in a cage. But, of course, if a commando gets through to De Aar they will all rise —  — ”

“You think so, Sister?” said the medical Major, deferentially.

“I know so. They will rise anywhere in the Colony if a commando comes actually to them. Presently they will rise in Prieska — if it is only to steal the forage at Van Wyk’s Vlei. Why not?”

“We get most of our opinions of the war from Sister Margaret,” said the civilian doctor of the train. “It’s all new to me, but, so far, all her prophecies have come true.”

A few months ago that doctor had retired from practice to a country house in rainy England, his fortune made and, as he tried to believe, his life-work done. Then the bugles blew, and, rejoicing at the change, he found himself, his experience, and his fine bedside manner, buttoned up in a black-tabbed khaki coat, on a hospital train that covered eleven hundred miles a week, carried a hundred wounded each trip and dealt him more experience in a month than he had ever gained in a year of home practice.

Sister Margaret and the Captain of Mounted Infantry took their cups outside the tent. The Captain wished to know something more about her. Till that day he had believed South Africa to be populated by sullen Dutchmen and slack-waisted women; and in some clumsy fashion betrayed the belief.

“Of course, you don’t see any others where you are,” said Sister Margaret, leniently, from her camp-chair. “They are all at the war. I have two brothers, and a nephew, my sister’s son, and — oh, I can’t count my cousins.” She flung her hands outward with a curiously un-English gesture. “And then, too, you have never been off the railway. You have only seen Capetown? All the schel — all the useless people are there. You should see
our
country beyond the ranges — out Oudtshorn way. We grow fruit and vines. It is much prettier,
I
think, than Paarl.”

“I’d like to very much. I may be stationed in Africa after the war is over.”

“Ah, but we know the English officers. They say that this is a ‘beastly country,’ and they do not know how to — to be nice to people. Shall I tell you? There was an aide-de-camp at Government House three years ago. He sent out invitations to dinner to Piet — to Mr. Van der Hooven’s wife. And she had been dead eight years, and Van der Hooven — he has the big farms round Craddock — just then was thinking of changing his politics, you see — he was against the Government, — and taking a house in Capetown, because of the Army meat contracts. That was why, you see?”

“I see,” said the Captain, to whom this was all Greek.

“Piet was a little angry — not much — but he went to Capetown, and that aide-de-camp had made a joke about it — about inviting the dead woman in the Civil Service Club. You see? So of
course
the, opposition there told Van der Hooven that the aide-de-camp had said he could not remember all the old Dutch vrows that had died, and so Piet Van der Hooven went away angry, and now he is more hot than ever against the Government. If you stay with us you must not be like
that
. You see?”

“I won’t,” said the Captain, seriously. “What a night it is, Sister!” He dwelt lovingly on the last word, as men did in South Africa.

The soft darkness had shut upon them unawares and the world had vanished. There was not so much breeze as a slow motion of the whole dry air under the vault of the immeasurably deep heavens. “Look up,” said the Captain; “doesn’t it make you feel as if we were tumbling down into the stars — all upside down?”

“Yes,” said Sister Margaret, tilting her head back. “It is always like that. I know. And those are
our
stars.”

They burned with a great glory, large as the eyes of cattle by lamp-light; planet after planet of the mild Southern sky. As the Captain said, one seemed to be falling from out the hidden earth sheer through space, between them.

“Now, when I was little,” Sister Margaret began very softly, “there was one day in the week at home that was all our own. We could get up as soon as we liked after midnight, and there was the basket in the kitchen — our food, We used to go out at three o’clock sometimes, my two brothers, my sisters, and the two little ones — out into the Karroo for all the day. All — the — long — day. First we built a fire, and then we made a kraal for the two little ones — a kraal of thorn bushes so that they should not be bitten by anything. You see? Often we made the kraal before morning — when those” — she jerked her firm chin at the stars — ”were just going out. Then we old ones went hunting lizards — and snakes and birds and centipedes, and all that sort of nice thing. Our father collected them. He gave us half-a-crown for a spuugh-slange — a kind of snake. You see?”

“How old were you?” Snake-hunting did not strike the Captain as a safe amusement for the young.

“I was eleven then — or ten, perhaps, and the little ones were two and three. Why? Then we came back to eat, and we sat under a rock all afternoon. It was hot, you see, and we played — we played with the stones and the flowers. You should see our Karroo in spring! All flowers! All our flowers! Then we came home, carrying the little ones on our backs asleep — came home through the dark just like this night. That was our own day! Oh, the good days! We used to watch the meer-cats playing, too, and the little buck. When I was at Guy’s, learning to nurse, how home-sick that made me!”

“But what a splendid open-air life!” said the Captain.

“Where else
is
there to live except the open air?” said Sister Margaret, looking off into twenty thousand square miles of it with eyes that burned.

“You’re quite right.”

“I’m sorry to interrupt you two,” said Sister Dorothy, who had been talking to the gunner Major; “but the guard says we shall be ready to go in a few minutes. Major Devine and Dr. Johnson have gone down already.”

“Very good, Sister. We’ll follow.” The Captain rose unwillingly and made for the worn path from the camp to the rail.

“Isn’t there another way?” said Sister Margaret. Her grey nursing gown glimmered like some big moth’s wing.

“No. I’ll bring a lantern. It’s quite safe.”

“I did not think of
that
,” she said with a laugh; “only
we
never come home by the way we left it when we live in the Karroo. If any one — suppose you had dismissed a Kaffir, or got him sjamboked,
²
and he saw you go out? He would wait for you to come back on a tired horse, and then. . . . You see? But, of course, in England where the road is all walled, it is different. How funny! Even when we were little we learned never to come home by the way we went out.”

“Very good,” said the Captain, obediently. It made the walk longer, and he approved of that.

“That’s a curious sort of woman,” said the Captain to the Major, as they smoked a lonely pipe together when the train had, gone.

“
You
seemed to think so.”

“Well — I couldn’t monopolize Sister Dorothy in the presence of my senior officer. What was she like?”

“Oh, it came out that she knew a lot of my people in London. She’s the daughter of a chap in the next county to us, too.”

.     .     .     .     .

The General’s flag still flew before his unstruck tent to amuse Boer binoculars, and loyal lying correspondents still telegraphed accounts of his daily work. But the General himself had gone to join an army a hundred miles away; drawing off, from time to time, every squadron, gun and company that he dared. His last words to the few troops he left behind covered the entire situation.

“If you can bluff ‘em till we get round ‘em up north to tread on their tails, it’s all right. If you can’t, they’ll probably eat you up. Hold ‘em as long as you can.”

So the skeleton remnant of the brigade lay close among the kopjes till the Boers, not seeing them in force on the sky-line, feared that they might have learned the rudiments of war. They rarely disclosed a gun, for the reason that they had so few; they scouted by fours and fives instead of clattering troops and chattering companies, and where they saw a too obvious way opened to attack they, lacking force to drive it home, looked elsewhere. Great was the anger in the Boer commando across the river — the anger and unease.

“The reason is they have so few men,” the loyal farmers reported, all fresh from selling melons to the camp, and drinking Queen Victoria’s health in good whisky. “They have no horses — only what they call Mounted Infantry. They are afraid of us. They try to make us friends by giving us brandy. Come on and shoot them. Then you will see us rise and cut the line.”

“Yes, we know how you rise, you Colonials,” said the Boer commandant above his pipe. “We know what has come to all your promises from Beaufort West, and even from De Aar.
We
do the work — all the work, — and you kneel down with your parsons and pray for our success. What good is that? The President has told you a hundred times God is on our side. Why do you worry Him? We did not send you Mausers and ammunition for
that
.”

“We kept our commando-horses ready for six months — and forage is very dear. We sent all our young men,” said an honoured member of local society.

“A few here and a few servants there. What is that? You should have risen down to the sea all together.”

“But you were so quick. Why did not you wait the year? We were not ready, Jan.”

“That is a lie. All you Cape people lie. You want to save your cattle and your farms. Wait till
our
flag flies from here to Port Elizabeth and you shall see what you will save when the President learns how you have risen — you clever Cape people.”

The saddle-coloured sons of the soil looked down their noses. “Yes — it is true. Some of our farms are close to the line. They say at Worcester and in the Paarl that many soldiers are always coming in from the sea. One must think of that — at least till they are shot. But we know there are very few in front of you here. Give them what you gave the fools at Stormberg, and you will see how we can shoot rooineks.”
³

“Yes. I know that cow. She is always going to calve. Get away. I am answerable to the President — not to the Cape.”

But the information stayed in his mind, and, not being a student of military works, he made a plan to suit. The tall kopje on which the English had planted their helio-station commanded the more or less open plain to the northward, but did not command the five-mile belt of broken country between that and the outmost English pickets, some three miles from camp. The Boers had established themselves very comfortably among these rock-ridges and scrub-patches, and the “great war” drizzled down to long shots and longer stalking. The young bloods wanted rooineks to shoot, and said so.

“See here,” quoth the experienced Jan van Staden that evening to as many of his commando as cared to listen. “You youngsters from the Colony talk a lot. Go and turn the rooineks out of their kopjes to-night. Eh? Go and take their bayonets from them and stick them into them. Eh? You don’t go!” He laughed at the silence round the fire.