Part 18

Blake cleared the blood from his eyes and looked. The attack had wavered and had turned upon itself, for a compact little force of ten had filed out from behind a house and fallen upon the desert men in the rear. They were in all degrees of dress and undress. Their leader was very tall and very thin, with a great bush of hair, upon which he wore the remains of a tarboosh, and he had an empty bandoleer round his neck. He and his were armed variously, ranging from a damaged Martini to an inlaid jesail from the North. These weapons they were using variously, in disciplined silence. So much Blake saw in a photographic flash of amazement. Then strength came back to him, and he and the sergeant flung themselves across the dead camel.

“Come on, you black rascals!” shouted Blake, staggering as he stood.

“Follow me, sons of darkness!” yelled the sergeant.

The men obeyed with howls. Caught between two forces, the enemy fighting like wolves, were driven down alleys, cut down in corners, scattered and broken. In five minutes Blake’s men and their unknown allies were staring and panting under the gate, their work done.

“Now,” suggested the Haussa, patting Blake all over with his delicate black hands in a search for fatal injuries—“now I go and picket that street whence came the cooking smell.”

“Wait!” commanded Blake. He looked at the gate; at the dead lying in the light and the black shadows. Even now the gold had scarcely gone from the faint, hot blue sky; scattered bands of birds still flew across it, and the high air seemed stirred with a multitude of wings. He looked at the leader of the allies, who was standing on one leg and grinning anxiously.

“Who art thou?”

The man drew his dusty heels together and carefully saluted.

“We be the men of Mannering Bimbashi.”

“Of Mannering Bimbashi?”

“Yea, Master. I was a policeman of the force wherewith he policed this town. He said to us, ‘Go here’ or ‘Go there,’ and we went and punished the evil-doers. Twice and thrice have I fought under Mannering Bimbashi.” He gazed contemptuously at his command. “These others are also of his force, or of his house—warriors, as I am, or gardeners and herders of goats; but all Mannering Bimbashi’s men.”

“Go on,” said Blake quietly.

“Mannering Bimbashi was slain, and many of his folk; but I was left. I remembered. I gathered these others together, and bade them remember also. Mannering Bimbashi was dead, but we were not freed from our service. We had to live. I was a seller of rock-salt in the market-place, and these others did work after their kind. Sometimes we met and spoke together. None knew us for his men, and his name might not be upon our lips; but we laid our hands upon our mouths—so—and then we remembered.”

“Go on.”

“There is no more. It is very difficult to remember. But I knew the English would come in the footsteps of our Bimbashi and I held these of his together in readiness, as thou hast seen. But our Bimbashi—on whom be peace!—has been dead a long time, and now we would take service with thee, O master.”

“Thou hast done well.” Blake’s voice shook a little as he thought how well. “Thou hast done very well. But why?”

The man was very ugly and very black, but all the poetry and sadness of the Arab were in his face as he answered:

“We were his men. We loved him.”

Blake’s eyes were dim as he looked across at the ruined house. There, Mannering had gone down, and his hope, his work, his deeds—all these had gone down with him into dust.

“But even here there was love left,” said Blake aloud, with a kind of wonder; “even here there was love left!”

Then he took his men and Mannering’s and went to join Macartney in the ordering of Wakonda.

HE THAT COMETH AFTER

Admission was by ticket only, and Hillard wondered how and where the man sitting next him had obtained one. He was, in that decorously neutral assembly, as conspicuous in his way as a game-cock among crows. His coat was of some sort of greenish khaki, strapped, patched and pocketed over almost every available inch of its surface; his trousers did not fit him or the coat; his boots—Hillard could not see his boots, but he thought they were tan; his tie looked like a knotted red handkerchief; his hair was red, and he himself so scorched and reddened by sun that it seemed as if his cool grey eyes should have melted amid the fervent heat of his face. So much Hillard saw in his first casual inspection, as he sat awaiting boredom. After a bishop had introduced the speaker and the lecture had begun, he was too much interested in the slight black figure on the platform to spare much attention elsewhere. You know those bioscope pictures that show in a few minutes the life-cycle of a plant from seed to seed? Hillard says that Paul Raynor, with the aid of a magic lantern and his own simplicity, was showing them thus the birth of a seed of law and love, the growth of light in darkness, of safety in the shadow of death. Not a soul in the audience could remain quite unmoved.

It was about half-way through that Hillard felt a tug at his sleeve. The man in the khaki coat was leaning forward intently, his elbow on the back of the chair ahead and his hand at his ear.

“What did he say, mister?”

“I beg your pardon. When?”

The man lifted his hand impatiently. “Then. Before the last picture. I couldn’t be sure . . .”

“Oh, he said he was probably the only man in the country who knew the language.”

“Meanin’ himself? Raynor?”

“Yes.”

“Ah”—the man spoke with a certain jealous satisfaction—“so he thinks. But it ain’t so. It ain’t true.”

“Indeed?” Hillard was curt.

“Nah. I know it.”

Hillard looked at the interrupter who, quick as an animal to read a rebuff, had drawn away and was once more listening to the lecturer with a bitter intentness. Something made Hillard sorry he had been curt; so that when the audience broke up in unusual enthusiasm, and he found himself descending the stairs, shoulder to shoulder with the khaki coat, he followed the impulse of repentance and spoke.

“An uncommonly interesting talk, eh?”

“Interestin’?” The man eyed him warily. “Yes, I guess it was interestin’ all right.”

Hillard: “And you must have found it specially so knowing the country and the people.”

They had reached the pavement, and the man swung round almost threateningly. “Who says I know the country?”

“Well, I thought it likely, as you said you knew the language.”

“Ah, so I did, mister, so I did. . . And you was interested?”

“Why, yes. I think anyone would be. To see the school, the little thatched church, the neat fields, all grown up in a couple of years, and all the work of two white men. . . They’re brave fellows out there; good men.”

They had turned into the Park, pleasant with a sense of cool grass and damp borders. The man in khaki paused and sniffed luxuriously; the wariness had gone out of his face. “Yes,” he said, gravely, “they’re good men. That man Raynor, now, he’s a mix of holiness and horse-sense which you’d call uncommon. Yes, sir, uncommon. And all that good man has”—he turned suddenly and laid his hand on Hillard’s arm—“all that good man has, all he’s done, he owes to Brad Timmins, who weren’t good in any sense o’ the word. Queer, ain’t it?”

Hillard took him deftly by the elbow, turned him to a bench, and said, “Go on.”

It came something like this:

“We were days and days in the grass country, and that’s a thing very bad for the nerves. You see nothing but grass, close-packed, stem and blade. We travelled blind as if we was in a tunnel, and the roof of the tunnel was the achin’ sky. We’d brush through the grass as endless as water. And hot. . . Brad and I we quarreled all the way up, and, what made it worse, we had to quarrel amiable. In a friendly voice, I mean, so the niggers wouldn’t know. It’s that way. It was about a girl; and he’d curse me to kingdom come in a tea-and-ices sort of tone that made me sick, and I’d answer accordin’. He was a hard case, was Brad. But pretty soon he forgot about the girl, and thought of nothing but what we’d come for.

“The heat was such, and the glare on all them leagues of yellowish grass, I give you my word I scarce knew when we got among the trees. I just looked up, saw it was dark, felt a warm splash on my face, and there we was in the forest. Nothing gradual about that country. One hour that blazin’ grass, the next, them everlastin’ trees. Grass couldn’t have been no grassier, forest couldn’t have been no treeier. It’s that way. . .”

He looked at a taxi throbbing beside the curb, watched it as it slid away on the smooth asphalt. “Over there we don’t overrun things—dead things, I mean, like earth and trees and rivers. . . Or are they so dead? Well, over here it’s us that count; over there it’s them. Our life’s nothin’. And it’s not the people either; they may be little better than beasts. But you could plant London, Paris, and Noo York among them trees, and it wouldn’t make no difference—at least, not to last. Them things are so strong. It’s that way.

“We was after ivory, and not green stuff that’s been buried for years, waiting for a good bargain, either. Brad he wanted it fresh. He wanted a good village on the edge of the forest where he could get more hunters and porters, and store his ivory, and send it back in lots. He didn’t think or pray or want for a thing but ivory.

“We found a village. . . Yes, Raynor’s village. There wasn’t no church then, nor no school, and the trees was thicker. Raynor thinned ’em a lot and quite wise. But I see he’s took down some of our stockade, which ain’t so wise. You see that picture of the reclaimed witch-doctor with the locket round his neck, a hoeing his pumpkin-patch? Well, that feller, he run things, and the young headman was under his thumb. He was too clever for a nigger—he favoured us for his reasons, and we favoured him for ours, and things was very pleasant and comfortable all around.

“Brad and me we’d go off in the grass country for days after the herds. Yes, and we had good luck. You wouldn’t get such luck now, not anywheres. A wonderful great country under the moon, and the elephants moving. . . Well, it’s that way. And then we’d go back to our clean grass huts huddling on the edge of the trees, and we’d see the little fires at night and hear the girls chatter, and it would seem ’most like home. Then the young chief he’d come in and talk. A bright young feller and we sort o’ fascinated him. He got terribly fond of Brad Timmins. Brad he was a big, open-faced, hearty-speakin’ sort, and it wasn’t till you know’d him well that you’d see how tight his mouth shut and how hard his eyes was. He was always most fair and friendly with the natives, and they thought no end of him. Only that old witch-doctor, squatting in his hut among the rags and chickens—only he saw through Brad. He’d say: ‘That white man would burn a whole village for the sake of one tusk,’ and it was quite true. But the young headman would say: ‘I’m black and he is white, but he is my friend.’ And the doctor, blinking his black eyelids with the gray lashes like a monkey’s, he’d laugh.

“We sent off three lots of ivory down country. We’d a pile growing, and I—I was getting a bit tired of it. I wanted to take my share and make for the coast, and enjoy myself awhile. Well, it’s that way with me. I ain’t hard like Brad was. But he was a shark over the ivory. He never got enough. He killed out that country—not for the lust to kill that sometimes takes a man, but because of the money in the ivory, which, I give you my word, is quite a different thing, mister. He was like a miser too. He’d a store of the very finest tusks wrapped up like babies and buried under the floor of his hut. He just couldn’t bear to part with ’em, though he knew they might sp’ile. He just loved ’em. No one knew they was there, but me, and he didn’t know I knew. They was his secret hoard, like in a book. I didn’t care. I give you my word that I was half-scared o’ Brad Timmins them days, he was that mad on the ivory, though always most fair and friendly to them that helped him to it.

“I’m nothing to boast of in the way of softness, mister, as you can guess; but there’s things. . . Well, it’s that way with me. You’ll find a feelin’ if you dig far enough, as the dentist said. There’s a few things that reach home to me, and that young headman he was one of them when he pulled Brad out from a charging bull. Yes, sir; right out from under. And boosted him up a tree, and nipped up himself, and Brad he shot the bull. It was a fine thing. ‘You’ll give him a gun for that,’ I says to Brad. And Brad, he says; ‘You mind your own business. I’ve no guns to spare.’ Then I knew he’d do it cheap, and I was ashamed, and I give the nigger my own third gun, and told him it came from Brad, and not because of the gun, but because he’d saved his life. Yes, it’s that way. Queer, ain’t it?

“Well, that country was just about used up; all our ivory was on its way south, and I wanted to follow it. But Brad he would go on. He was set on travelling round the edge of the tree belt till we found fresh elephant country, using the village as a base camp. He had his way, as a man who don’t care nothin’ for nobody else most generally does. The village howled with grief, all but the old witch-doctor, who made our arrangements for us. At the end of the talk he said something that sounded like ‘Mabendy.’

“What’s that?” said I.

“He waved his hands toward the forest. ‘Very bad people,’ he said, ‘come and fight, try and take the village. If they take it, they eat us.’

“And a tough morsel you’d be,” I thought to myself. And Brad, he laughed. The headman was there, too, and generally when Brad laughed he’d laugh. He didn’t now. He said: ‘It is very bad. They are as many as the leaves, and their arrows are strong. They came once before and we beat them off, but they killed many of our fighting men. Now our huts are full of children again, but they are little, and I have just taken my third wife, whom I love. It is very bad.’ He laid his hand, which was black as a coal and delicate as a girl’s, for a moment on Brad’s. ‘It is very bad if they come while you, a great warrior, are away. But I will send a messenger, and then you will return and help us.’

“Yes. He said it just like that. Not as a question. He thought Brad was his friend, you see, and spoke accordin’.

“Brad Timmins he looked at me with one big wink, but I looked at my boots. Later I said to him: ‘If Mabendy—whoever he or they are—comes, and you’re sent for and you don’t go, you’ll lose your face. You won’t get no more hunters and beaters out o’ that village.’ And he swore at me with pure astonishment as a meddlesome grannie that minded what a pack of niggers thought. Yes, he swore amazin’.”

A girl passed, wearing small, high-heeled, patent-leather shoes; the man in khaki watched them gravely until the girl was out of sight. Then he said, suddenly, “But not so bad as when the message come”—and was once more silent.

“Then Mabendy came?”

The man in khaki looked at Hillard, nodding gravely, “Yes, mister. As we heard by special messenger, two days out—a boy with a rag round his head. He come reeling up our line and rolled at Brad’s feet, gasping out a word or two. And Brad he began kickin’ him cruel.

“‘Whatever are you doin’?’ I says, pulling Brad back. He was in a breathless rage, and couldn’t speak for a minute.

“‘Those f-fools,’ he stutters, ‘those fools! Do they think. . .’ His voice ran up to a sort of yell. And then, all of a sudden he stopped, gapin’ at me like a fish, and his jaw workin’.

“‘What is it _now_?’ I says.

“He lets out a sort of whisper—’ My tusks—and the next moment, mister, I give you my word, he was beatin’ our boys with a gun-butt to turn ’em round quicker.”

The man leaned down and brushed some dust from his outrageous trousers. “Yes. He’d remembered those tusks, you see—those choice tusks that I wasn’t expected to know of. Yes; buried under the floor of his hut. He was afraid Mabeady’d find ’em. So we was goin’ back. . . . . .”

He was silent again. When he did speak it was unexpected.

“These pants ’re his.”

“Whose?”

“Brad’s. He was a bigger man than me.”

“Did he give them to you!”

“No, mister; I shouldn’t say gave. . . Found ’em, I did—aft. Couldn’t find anything else; it’d been all took and distributed. No, not exactly stole; more for relics, like the Cath’lics.”

“Then you got back to the village?”

“Yes, we got back—in a little more than thirty hours—half dead, because of the ivory. . . . There was a little hillock beyond arrow-shot, overlooking the village. We was goin’ to spy out a bit from this. We hadn’t met no enemy. The sun was settin’ behind us, behind the great grass-country—settin’ terrible bright, and every leaf and branch on the edge of the forest was sharp and distinct in a great blaze of gold light. Never see such light here, mister. We left our boys on the ground, and Brad and me we crawled up that hillock to have a look. . . .

“The first thing that struck me was the quiet. It was all so quiet. Not till you saw that little black ripple and eddy among the huts would you have guessed that it was men fighting—for their homes and their kids—as you or me might do. It was the absence of firearms that made it seem so quiet.

“I didn’t see it all so quick as Brad; he was ahead of me. When he saw the fight among the huts he gave a cry, kind of as if he was hurt. I guess he was. Then his breath seemed to go from him, and he stood up clear on the top of the mound, his arms out, cursing in whispers—because of the ivory.

“That great gold light seemed to beat on him like water. I can’t describe it, mister. He seemed to grow bigger, to tower over the huts, to be as huge as one of the trees. To those poor harried folk in the shadow he must have shown, I take it, like a god, a deliverer,—a saviour—there in the light with his arms spread out. Come to save ’em, eh?

“I give you my word for it, the whole fight was held up while you could count twenty, while they stared up at the great gold figure on the hillock. Then—we was out of arrow-range, but some one had an old breech-loader—Brad he went down coughing. When I ran up, ‘Damn you,’ he groans. ‘Don’t stop here. Get the tusks out, you fool’. . . Yes, he’d forgot I wasn’t supposed to know about them. They was the last thing he thought of, I guess—this side.

“Then . . .?”

He began again with a start. “Then our men from the village rushed up behind me, mad. And we went down. . .

“I don’t remember much else, mister, I never do. Some takes it this way and some that. I got a crack on the head, too, and when I come round a few days after, Brad Timmins he was dead and buried _and_ what you might call canonized. Yes, sir.

“Which way? Well, for coming back at the call of his friend in need, I suppose, and losin’ his life over it. ‘A man of great heart is he who will go into the dark night at the word of his brother,’ said the young headman to me; I believe it says much the same thing in the Bible. . . And the old witch-doctor pipes up, ‘If he was indeed a man, O child!’

“Mister, I saw the beginning of what you and your kind would call a very curious process—the making of a god. Me, I simply didn’t count, though I’d done a lot more than stand on top of a hill in the sunset. Why, I was all blacked up with the back-spit of my old Colt. It’s that way. . . . I went to look at Brad’s grave, and it was all planted round with holy bushes and a mess of rags and feathers and pots and pumpkins. And while I stood there a woman led her little boy up to the grave and set his little black hand like a monkey’s paw on the earth, and said something to Brad. And in two weeks it was rumoured that Brad didn’t like folks round there after dark. And in three it was said that as he stood on the hillock he’d gathered the sun’s rays in his hands and turned them into the blinded faces of Mabendy. Our village had got off uncommon cheap, and it was all laid down to Brad Timmins. ‘Most unreasonable. But it’s that way. . . .

“And the stamp of Brad Timmins was on every white man after that. He became the type—what you’d call the symbol, mister. He, in his grave there, smoothed the way for Raynor. Raynor, he was listened to because of Brad Timmins. You may say the church was built by Brad, and the schools laid on him as a foundation stone. And all the time. . . Well, what gets me is, who’ll have the credit, eh?”

“And the ivory?”

The man in khaki coughed uneasily. “I give you my word, and you may set me down for a fool, I left the ivory where it was. I guess it’s there still. They’d have known. . . poor devils in the dark. . . I guess I’ve kept you an uncommon time, mister.”

“Not too long.” Hillard drew out a card. “This is my name and address. Will you take it, and—come and tell me some more any time you’re inclined?”

“Thank you; I’d be pleased.” He got up and shook hands absently, and turned away. But he came back.

“Raynor and his kind they don’t know. They can’t know. Stands to reason. . . But you saw the picture of that old witch-doctor hoeing his pumpkins that innocent? Yes? And the locket made o’ cocoa tins round his neck? Yes? There’s the heart of Brad Timmins in them cocoa-tins.” He moved off again, pausing only to say, gravely over his shoulder, “And I guess it rattles about inside like a dried bean.”

Then he went, and Hillard watched him walking cautiously among the well-dressed crowd, as if he were afraid of tripping over the roots of trees, the blinding spears of the elephant grass.

THE CLOSED DOOR

Tonio brought the news after dinner with the turgid mix he called coffee. “Concepcion says,” he remarked, “that there has been a battle beyond Cienaga and all the insurgents have been destroyed. But Concepcion is a liar anyway, and does the señor wish me to open another tin of milk? There is no more fresh. The cow is dead.”

Fellowes lifted his head with a jerk from the sticky leather cushion where he had just laid it, too tired even to swear. “Hello! say that again.”

“The cow is dead and Pepita wept. There is no doubt that it is dead . . .”

“Never mind. I mean about the battle.”

“Saints! Concepcion says there has been one beyond Cienaga, and all the insurgentes have been killed.”

“Who told him?”

“A man who fought in the battle, señor, a man who was there. Pedro is hiding him in the cafetaria.”

“Why?”

“Quien sabe? Pedro says he is frightened. And there is no fresh milk. Little Mother of God, that cow was exhausta . . .”

“Be quiet. Give me my boots again.”

For all his tiredness, Fellowes dropped out of the hammock lightly enough. If there really had been a battle, and the insurgentes really had been wiped out, then the victorious troops would probably straggle back to the Town for rest and refreshment. In that case the Company must be warned, and the Company’s loose property swept up and secured. “Damn all governments, anyway,” said Fellowes, as he struggled with the boots, and wondered where he might lay hand on one of his foremen.

After the heat of the lighted room behind the nettings, the dusk was almost cool as he plunged into it. A storm was coming, and the sun had dropped early into dark cloud. Sky and forest were so much of a blackness that it looked as if the trees had suddenly and silently surged upward and swallowed the day. The foul little roads were dim and deserted; only the square flared with uncertain light. The church seemed at one moment to waver near the ground; the next, it flickered aloft, striking into the inverted pits of dark like a reflection in a well. Only in front of the café a compact and sweating crowd fought and screamed whole-heartedly, tiny by contrast of the night.