A MINING CAMP

The following day Carew avoided the camp, after telling Stanley he might devote his time to the ladies if he wished. In the afternoon, however, he saw Mr. Pym and his engineer arrive, and then, presently, the party all went down to the ruins together. About an hour later they re-emerged, and while the two girls went back to the tents, the millionaire strolled towards the police camp. Carew, seizing his opportunity, came out, and went to meet him. He considered himself fortunate in being able to offer the necessary courtesies when the ladies of the party were absent. Mr. Pym hid his surprise at seeing so distinguished-looking an officer at such an out-of-the-way camp, and received his somewhat curt greetings in his own quiet, business-like manner. He thanked him for the attentions he had already rendered, and hoped they were not causing any inconvenience in pitching their tents near the ruins. Carew assured him they were not, and mentioned that Mr. Stanley would be happy to place his time at their service and do anything he could to make their stay agreeable.

Henry Pym, noting the obvious intention of the officer not to place much of his own time at their disposal, looked quietly into the resolute face, and felt his interest growing apace. At the same time, following his lead, he made no attempt to lengthen the interview, which he felt was more or less regarded as an official duty; and with courteous thanks said good night, hoped Major Carew would dine with them one evening, and returned to his tent.

“Well, uncle,” was Diana’s greeting, “what do you make of The Bear?”

“The Bear?...” questioningly.

“The cast-iron soldierman, who condescends to breathe the same air as ordinary mortals down there in the police camp.”

“O, Major Carew!...” with a quick gleam in his eyes. “I thought him rather a fine fellow. Don’t you?” and he smiled at her slyly.

“A fine bear,” quoth Diana, with a little pout. “I prefer a man with a little more flexibility. A little more commonplace flesh and blood, so to speak.”

“I asked him to dinner to-morrow,” her uncle remarked.

“And is he coming?” with ill-concealed interest.

“No. He is going to see two young miners named Macaulay a few miles away, and was regretfully compelled to decline,” and the humorous smile on his face widened, for he knew that Diana would be piqued.

“As if he couldn’t go there any day!” she grumbled. “O, of course, he is perfectly odious.”

Meryl’s eyes met her father’s, and they both laughed, while he remarked, “Never mind; perhaps we can lay a trap for him another time. Evidently he has no particular fancy for ladies’ company.”

“Do you know the Macaulays?” Meryl asked.

“No, but I am going to see them in two or three days on business.”

“And you will take us?...” she pleaded. “I do want so to see all we can of the settlers as well as the country.”

“We will see later,” he said, and made a move to prepare for dinner.

During the next two days he and his engineer made sundry small excursions on business. Their investigation of several outcrops in the Victoria district had convinced them the gold was by no means worked out by that ancient people who had left so many traces of mining operations, and Mr. Pym was prepared to buy up claims and properties. On the fourth day he went to see the Macaulays, and took the girls with him, having procured a mule each for them to ride. Stanley and Carew were also to be of the party; the latter not a little to everyone’s surprise.

All through the four days he had held consistently aloof, personating merely the courteous official upon whom Mr. Pym had a certain claim because of the letter from headquarters. As a matter of fact, he had undertaken a journey of some length on two of the days to outlying kraals; and Diana, hearing of it from Stanley, had laughed a little grimly, and said, “He need not have troubled. We have no wish to speak to him”; and Stanley, not quite clever enough to understand, remarked regretfully, “But you would like him so much if you knew him properly.”

The reason was not very apparent for his accompanying them to the Macaulays’ mine, but Meryl shrewdly suspected her father, who had gone quietly to smoke a pipe in the police camp with him on one or two occasions, had asked him to come more or less as a personal favour. For though Stanley knew the road perfectly he knew very little about the surrounding country itself; and Mr. Pym, with his unerring instinct, had quickly discovered that Carew’s mind was a well of knowledge on most things Rhodesian. So the taciturn soldier joined the cavalcade, though he succeeded in attaching himself to Mr. Pym and riding well on ahead.

The two Macaulays were “small miners,” working on tribute a mine belonging to a block owned by a company in which Henry Pym had large interests. Complaints had come through to his ears concerning the difficult conditions upon which the two young miners, and many others like them, struggled to make a fortune or a livelihood, and he had a fancy to go and see them for himself. The mine was in a hollow, banked round by tall, gloomy kopjes, which seemed to stand like a bodyguard, sternly shutting them off from all sight or sound of the outside world. At the same time, the road to it was delightful. Sometimes they climbed nearly to the top of a kopje, the mules going up stairways of granite as if born to it, and the lovely country lay outspread in a glorious panorama before them.

The party said very little, but their eyes told that the fascination had crept into their hearts already, though they could only appreciate in silence, wondering, perhaps, why they felt this strong attraction for a land that was chiefly kopjes and veldt.

Was it, perhaps, the marvellous, translucent atmosphere, or was it the blue intensity of the dreaming kopjes, ornamented ever and anon by gleaming white battlements of granite, where the sun blazed down on giant boulders, or was it the unfathomable, mysterious, syren-like allurement of the country, that, without effort, without thought, steeped the senses in an irresistible fascination? Why does Rhodesia fascinate? Why does she call men back again and again to her manifold discomforts and unnerving disappointments, to her pests and glare, to her bully beef and unwashed Kaffirs? Who shall say?... Who shall attempt to explain?...

There is no explanation; only the foolish would seek it. The country just gets up and takes hold of one and smiles, and men become enslaved to her. Ever after “the hazy blue of her mountains, the waft of the veldt-born scent,” is like a germ in the blood. The discomforts are forgotten, the disappointments dissolve into air, the noontide glare and choking dust are a mere nothing: libellous creations of some discontented grumbler. And in the midst of the crowd, or in England’s green lanes, or on some far shore, the wanderer is caught in the old mesh suddenly, and all his pulses beat with swift longing at just that heaven-sweet impression: “The hazy blue of her mountains, the waft of the veldt-born scent....”

And she, the syren, lies there in her sunshine and her loveliness; locked in the arms of the deep, luscious, dreaming nights, whispering and murmuring softly under embracing, star-lit heavens; making wild riot when the splendid storms fling after each other across her bosom, while the thunders roll deafeningly amidst her kopjes, and the lightning pierces brilliantly the riotous clouds and makes a glory of the mighty scene. Sulky and colourless when she is waiting impatiently for the delayed rains; resplendent, and with a colouring that is like a Te Deum, when the renewing has come, and all her soul sings aloud in the joy of spring, and all her flowers and trees lend her loveliness past telling, and her hills a yet deeper blueness under yet intenser, rain-washed skies. All this all her moods and whims and waywardness going serenely on splendidly, superbly indifferent to the men who come to tame her and stay to love in silent enslavement; as also to the men who come solely for gain and gold, and go away shrieking their complainings to the four winds. Because, perhaps, the enchantress has not troubled to show them her allurements, and ruffled, discontented minds have discovered only the dust and heat and pests.

But what of it to the syren?... There are others who stay, as many, perhaps, as she wants, and to whom she puts out a shy hand of friendship, and presently soothes and consoles as the strong, silent, storm-tossed man who rode with so soldierly a bearing beside Mr. Pym; suffering no stab of love and longing any more as he looked over her fair bosom, because the shy hand was in his, because there was that subtle sense of understanding in his heart which seemed to tell him that even as he loved Rhodesia, Rhodesia loved him.

And so they came to the Saucy Susan Gold Mine, at least to the ridge of the surrounding kopjes, and looked down to where a cluster of huts like beehives told them humans dwelt down there in the hollow.

“It can’t be a mine,” said Diana. “It’s just a hollow in the hills; the sort of place giants hide in when they play hide-and-seek.”

“But it is,” Stanley assured her. “We shall see a little more as we wind down.”

And presently they came within view of a shaft, and two honest-eyed young Englishmen, both old Charterhouse boys, came forward to greet them.

Meryl shook hands with her face all aglow with interest; and to their humble apologies that they had only huts to invite them into, she said, “But it is so nice of you to invite us at all. You wouldn’t believe how proud I am to come here to see you, and how tremendously interested.”

And Diana, with a droll expression, remarked, “You seem to live rather in the nethermost depths. You must feel as if you were going to heaven literally and figuratively every time you ascend to the outer world.”

The elder brother laughed pleasantly, but the younger, who had a white face and a delicate, refined air, looked at her a little wistfully. Meryl chatted on with the elder, but Diana, with her quick perception, scented a silent, wordless, plucky endurance of adverse conditions in the younger, and gave her attention to him.

Then they went into the dining-room hut, and found a meal spread on a roughly made table, with only two chairs for seats and all the rest packing-cases.

“Who has to sit on a chair?” asked Diana. “I needn’t, need I?...”

“Why, they are quite sound!... Are you afraid of a spill?...” asked Lionel Macaulay, looking amused.

“No, only I can sit on a chair any day of my life. I simply insist upon having a packing-case when such a good opportunity offers.”

So Meryl and her father were duly ensconced in the only two chairs, and Diana mounted gaily on to a tall, thin packing-case, which would certainly have gone over backwards if Colin, the rather sad-eyed brother, had not caught her just as she was overbalancing.

“How clever of you!...” she laughed. “What happens when you two overbalance and don’t happen to be near enough to catch each other?... Does the dinner come in and find you both sprawling on the floor?”

“Well, we’ve had a good deal of practice, you see,” he told her, already cheering visibly. “The tables are turned for us, and we choose a chair when we can get it, for a treat.”

Afterwards she made him show her all his clever contrivances for packing-case furniture, and admired his sackcloth curtain, barrel washhand stand, and made him feel vigorous and hopeful.

Stanley was talking to Meryl, and Lionel Macaulay was showing Mr. Pym, the engineer, and Carew over the mine, so she gossiped away to him all by herself. And she drew from him a little of the bitter disappointments they had encountered in the country. A story of first one mine and then another failing them; of capital slipping away and bills mounting; of the gradual cutting down of comforts and increased austerity of living: a story common enough in all colonies where Life puts men through the mill again and again to prove and harden them. Acting perhaps on the lines:

“It is easy enough to be pleasant
When life moves along like a song,
But the man worth while is the man who can smile
When everything goes dead wrong.”

Life wants a lot of men and women whom she knows are “worth while” in carrying out her great affairs, and that is perhaps why so often “everything goes dead wrong.”

Diana maintained her rôle of gay inconsequence because it pleased her best.

“It all sounds very superior and all that rot, and I’m sure Meryl would call you a hero; but I should swear myself black and blue in your shoes, and that’s about what you do pretty often, I expect.”

His smile grew fresher and more genuine.

“It doesn’t do much good though.”

“O yes it does. Don’t tell me! When things get into a silly stupid mess with me I just shut the door and say every swear word I know until I feel better. That’s one advantage of living in a hollow in the desert. You needn’t even bother to shut the door!... You can shout your ruffled feelings to the kopjes, and I suppose they echo the words back to you. How perfectly splendid! That’s a thing about Rhodesia I hadn’t thought of before. Of course, the echoes are sometimes wonderful; so if you were to shout a few swear words the kopjes would shout them after you; and that’s much better than ‘dreaming stillness’ in my opinion. But why aren’t you and your brother making a fortune? I thought everyone in Rhodesia was making one who had a mine.”

“We don’t get up enough gold. By the time we have paid our royalty and the expenses there is nothing left.”

“Then the royalty must be too big. Who do you pay it to?”

He coloured, and she watched him humorously.

“Has my uncle something to do with your company? O, don’t look uncomfortable. I’ll just talk to him about it. There ought to be occasions when no royalty is taken at all. I’ll tell him so.”

Colin Macaulay laughed into her smiling eyes.

“As it is, there is a charge for everything, even the grass the donkeys eat!...”

“O, monstrous! I never heard of such a thing. I’ll interview the board about it if you like. Tell your donkeys they may eat anything they choose in future, it is not going down in the bill any more!...” and they both laughed gaily.

In a more serious mood, however, she asked him presently, “I suppose it has been rather a disappointment?... This coming out to Rhodesia to make a fortune!”

“Why do you think so?”

“O, well, lots of reasons. You haven’t come within sight of the fortune, for one thing; and you’ve still got packing-case furniture and live in huts. And you eat a lot of bully beef, now don’t you?”

“We do.”

“But that isn’t what you came for?”

“Still” meditatively “it’s not a small thing to be in a country where a fortune may be won any day. It is that, of course, which keeps us going. It is better anyhow than a stool and one hundred and fifty pounds a year in England.”

“Are you sure?” And she watched him with keen eyes.

He coloured slightly, but answered with firmness:

“Quite.”

“But not better than something else, perhaps?”

He saw that her interest was kindly and genuine, and suddenly drawn to expand he told her simply:

“It’s the isolation that hurts. Day after day, day after day, just this hollow and these kopjes, and never anyone to speak to except each other. We send for the mail once a week, but sometimes very little comes by it; and we get nothing fresh to read except a weekly Rhodesian paper. That is a gold mine to us for just one evening; but for all the rest there is nothing. Lionel is studying French, and I do a little also, but it palls after a time badly.”

“I should think so. It sounds as dry as dead bones.”

They were sitting upon a rocky knoll, and Diana had her hands clasped round her drawn-up knees, presenting a very attractive picture. “I’m not a true Imperialist at heart,” she informed him. “I hate gush and talk and heroics, but between you and me I think an awful lot of you men making your solitary fight in the wilderness. It’s always a lot easier to put up with discomforts when you know your next-door neighbour is jolly uncomfortable too. Of course, most people don’t say so, but that’s because they are conventional, and fondly try to persuade themselves, very unselfish also; but when they are honest they know quite well a misfortune is lightened when several others are in the same box. That’s why, on a wet day, I console myself sitting at the window and watching folks struggling with drenched umbrellas and bedraggled skirts. It’s so good to be safe inside.”

He waited with amused eyes.

“And, of course, the trouble for you is just sitting down here among these monotonous kopjes and being uncomfortable all alone. No one to grumble to ugh, how I should hate that! no one to feel superior with; no one to envy you, even if there were anything to envy. It’s a positive grave.”

“You’ve left out one of the worst contingencies. No one to discuss with; no friction of mind and opinions.”

“That comes under the heading of grumbling. When I discuss I almost always grumble about something. It is good for the progress of the world.” And she laughed whimsically. Then, with one of her sudden changes, “How long do you expect to stay on trying to dig up a fortune, and pretending it is worth while when you know you hate it like Old Harry?”

“We shall probably try another mine soon. That is what we want to do; but it cost so much to get our machinery down into this hollow we don’t quite know where to find the money to get it out again. So we just go on hoping we shall strike a good reef soon.”

She remained thoughtful and silent some moments, and then, as if to change the subject, remarked, “Mr. Stanley seems happy enough in his solitary place. He says he used to be in Salisbury, but very much prefers Zimbabwe.”

“Most of the police prefer a quiet place with good shooting; and now that he has Major Carew there so much it must often be interesting.”

“Do you know Major Carew well?” and her quick voice failed to entirely hide her interest.

“As well as perhaps anyone does. He comes to see us fairly often on Sundays.”

“But he is so silent, he can’t be very interesting.”

“He is not always silent.”

“No, sometimes he snarls,” with a little laugh.

“Ah! you don’t know him. Get him to talk to you about the natives; about their habits and legends and customs. There isn’t a man in Rhodesia knows more, and there isn’t one they trust more absolutely. He is down in this district now on their behalf, and before he set foot here they knew all about him. Natives a hundred miles apart communicate that sort of thing to each other. Every kraal here knew perfectly that he was stern and rigid, but absolutely just. If he once says a thing he stands by it, even if he gets into trouble at headquarters, which isn’t so very unusual. Someone out of jealousy or pique or utter inability to understand stern justice, will misrepresent his actions and misreport him for doing his duty. It’s a heart-breaking business for him sometimes; but he never gives in when it is keeping his word one way or the other with natives. He would sooner resign, and they know it; and fortunately they recognise his value and meet him somehow. Of course, he isn’t in the Native Department, properly speaking, but he has done a lot of work with them for some time.”

“And what do you think he is down here for now?”

“I don’t know; but it is some abuse or other that has reached the ears of the administration. This sort of thing happens among the short-sighted, small-minded Native Commissioners. There was a man a short time back who charged his house boys five shillings for everything they broke. At the end of six months they had had no pay at all, and were pretty heavily in debt. He was magistrate as well as commissioner and had them brought before his court, and promptly sentenced them to work six months for nothing.”

“What a shame!” she burst out indignantly.

“Or a Native Commissioner may terrorise a native into selling cattle to him for a mere song by nothing but a look. Of course, they are not allowed to buy cattle really, but if they are married their wives buy them instead sometimes, and then the Commissioner in an outlying district can fairly easily fix the price, if he has made himself a dread to all the kraals round. He can collect taxes, too, not strictly just, to make his accounts look well at headquarters.”

“But I thought Native Commissioners were always gentlemen?”

“They are generally, but they don’t all live up to the usually accepted standard. Some of them seem rather to glory in behaving like bounders and treating the native unjustly. It is bad for the country, but things are improving. Almost all new appointments now are made among public-school boys and Varsity men.”

“And do you think Major Carew is here about some such matters?”

“Yes; but it isn’t given out so, and no one knows just what. But the natives are fortunate to have him on their side. He is not in the least afraid, and he won’t shelter any unjust steward. On the other hand, whatever complaints there are against the natives will be just as honestly examined, and woe betide the kraals that are in the wrong! He is no Exeter Hall sentimentalist, and they must know it pretty well by now.”

“Why do you think he is out here at all? Surely he might have been a general with his K.C.M.G. if he had stayed in the army?”

“I rather fancy Carew would think that a small thing compared to what he has done in Rhodesia. After all, K.C.M.G.’s are pretty cheap nowadays, aren’t they? But it isn’t every man who can know a new country is grateful to him, and who has achieved all he has at a work he loves.”

“Why did he come?” Still Diana strove vainly to hide her interest. “Do you know?”

“Adventure, probably. A good many men from crack regiments came in the early days.”

“There must have been something more.”

“Perhaps.”

“Don’t you know?”

“No.” He looked at her with a little smile. “It isn’t the game to ask questions out here.”

“That is just what Mr. Stanley said, and it is so dull of you both. The man’s a perfect bear. I christened him ‘The Bear’ before I had known him an hour. But why is he? Why should he be? That’s what I want to know.”

“I don’t fancy you will. I doubt if anyone knows. He has never made friends, I think, out here, except with the Grenvilles, and they are some connection.”

“That’s the missionary and his wife, isn’t it? What in the world can a man like that see in a missionary? Of all the soppy, flabby individuals give me the usual specimen who goes out to preach Christianity to the heathen, and generally disgusts them and everyone else.”

“Not this missionary.”

“O, is he an original also?”

“He’s one of the finest men I’ve ever known.”

“Then what in the world is he buried in the wilderness for? I never knew anything so absurd. A fine soldier and administrator, just a policeman; a splendid man, just a missionary. And you and your brother just grubbing about in a God-forsaken mine, apparently for nothing. It is enough to make anyone wild.” And she faced him with that smouldering indignation she rarely allowed to come to the surface.

“But they are both in Rhodesia” ignoring her kindly inclusion of himself and his brother “and Rhodesia wants good men.”

“And when she gets them just buries them at her outposts. I haven’t much faith in your Rhodesia. She is a capricious jade. She absorbs a man’s finest qualities and best years and gives him nothing in return.”

“Ask Carew if she gives him nothing. Probably she has given him more than anyone else could give.”

She got up impatiently. “All the more reason why he shouldn’t be such a bear. People who have got what they want out of life ought to be amiable and friendly.”

She turned round, and found herself face to face with Carew himself, looking, if anything grimmer than ever.

“I came to tell you that tea is ready, and the others have already commenced.”

Diana looked straight into his eyes, with a daring, challenging expression. “And you heard me discussing your amiable attributes? I’m sorry, but” with a swift gleam “I do discuss something else sometimes.”

“I heard nothing,” he answered, returning her direct gaze, and stood aside for her to pass.