Cinderella in the South Part 9

That sunset a mighty crowd was there among the rocks. Much dead wood had been brought. Fathers, mothers, and children in costumes that ranged from skins to European fas.h.i.+ons shouldered or headed their f.a.ggots.' A grim thought obsessed the Bishop as he watched them. These people, so quiet and yielding as to the selling of sacrament, and levying of church vote how easily they might be swayed to more sinister reminiscences of the Middle Ages! If he and Topready and Azariah and the headman enjoined it, what would save certain aged heathen neighbors from an auto-da-fe for alleged witchcraft one of these nights? Were not some of those old scenes at the stake much like this scene before him? Did not country people come together much as these, with dark impa.s.sive faces and bundles of firewood? Did not they listen and listen so, until the time came to pile f.a.ggots to the glory of G.o.d?

He stood on a rock and looked down on the faces. Topready stood close beneath him looking cheerful, the native teacher was near looking dubious, next to him stood the headman with his white beard, looking amused. Around them the crowd poised and posed itself among the rocks with innate grace and imposing silence.

Even the babies in the goatskins were quiet.

The Bishop spoke of alms-giving. He said he did not like their plan of raising a house for Christ. Let people who loved Christ build churches if they wished to, but let them build churches according to their power to give! Let them not seek the labor or money of others, careless how it came! Rather let them wors.h.i.+p in the old and the small, than build a new and great church anyhow!

He, their Bishop, wished to buy their new church from them, paying back those who had helped to build, giving to each his due. He asked them, would they sell this church to him, to do with it as seemed to him good? If, when they built, they had made, as it were, a false start, let them start again, and this time so run that they might obtain the Promises of Christ. Would they sell their church to him?

He waited for an answer.

There was a hush. The eyes that watched him seemed almost overwhelming in their vigilance.

His eyes went wistfully off to the sky in front of him. What beaches of gold and weed-tangles of rose-color those were to the north-west the way of England.

Suddenly the silence was broken.

Azariah spoke out bravely. He had heard the words of his herdsman, and he knew that he had' gone astray, even like a lost bull. As for this thatched cattle-byre that they had built, let him who asked for it have it! Was it not his own?

One after another spoke. Their speeches all had the same import let the church be handed over to him that asked.

A roar of acclamation worth many speeches went up from the hill-side Then the Bishop asked those who carried f.a.ggots to follow him to the consecration. His shepherd's staff went before him. An earthen vessel smoked with incense in front of that again. He followed up the steep path in his s.h.i.+ning robes. Behind him came blazing gra.s.s torches, and behind them again wood-carriers. When they reached the hill's crown there was some delay in the gathering dusk. They were stacking the wood for the sacrifice. At last Topready turned to his chief with a happy face. All was prepared. The Bishop's voice rang out in one sonorous prayer of oblation. Then someone handed him a gra.s.s torch and he kindled the thatch above the altar. The church that misbegotten innocent flamed up toward heaven amber and grey and crimson under the stars.

EIGHT-EIGHT IN LAVENDER

Andrew Vine came out to Africa this year as a pilgrim, and was disappointed. He did not go about his pilgrimage in the right way to my thinking. For to begin with, on his own confession, he put himself in the hands of a born organizer, who was making up a party of fellow-travelers.

Of course they were provided with first-cla.s.s tickets for the boat, and enjoyed for sixteen days and more, in a same and narrow scene, an amplitude of the luxuries they were used to, and tired of. Then, dogged by a diet befitting that state to which it had pleased Providence to call them, they rode the Great North Road for some days in a northern express. Vine said that the Victoria Falls were all right, but that their surroundings were, many of them, perversely wrong. It was so very stale, the hotel business, with the moonlight river excursions and the Livingstone trips, far too much sleeked and smoothed by foresight, and tamed by taking of thought. If one had only traveled up with pack donkeys, provisioned with leathery meat and leathery damper! For Vine had known better times in Africa. He had known pioneer adventures in his headstrong youth but had fallen out of his Column after three crowded months. Tempted of fever, he had made a great refusal.

And now in this year, twenty-four years after, the sense of having seen better days at a t.i.the of the expense, oppressed him.

However, the tickets had been taken, and the splendidly null organization of their party had him in its grip. He went back from the Falls to Bulawayo, and was whisked out to Khami. Only an hour was allowed him to see the river. At the grave of the Matopos, he was allowed two hours. There a brooding Presence grappled with the languors of his pilgrimage. The demoniac discontent of that savage scene made great play with him, during the two hours he was there, but two hours are not a very long time. Soon they were scorching back again with an interval for tea at a well (or ill) appointed hotel. Vine was disposed to give up the dreary pilgrimage-game that very night, he told me. But the born organizer, coming to him after dinner, persuaded him to play it out. He offered to release him after the next lap the lap of Great Zimbabwe. When that was once finished to time, he proposed that the party should have a breather, a short spell of civilized life at Salisbury, should it so seem good to them. Vine could be spared for the s.p.a.ce of that interlude. Afterwards he would doubtless take boat with them for a cruise up the East Coast. He would be sufficiently reinvigorated to rough it out with them rigorously to the end. The East Coast route might not entail quite so many hards.h.i.+ps. Vine sighed, but he was a man of his word. He went to Zimbabwe without a murmur. He had longed for seventy-five miles of the dusty Umvuma post-cart, but alas, the day was the third of the new month! The railway extension to Victoria had been opened on the first. The organizer rubbed his hands as he told them the glad news: 'We can have a dining-car and sleeping berths now to within sixteen miles odd of the ruins.

We shan't need to fare so ruggedly after all. A lunch at the "Apes and Peac.o.c.ks" Hotel is about the worst of it. But we can take out a Fortnum and Mason's hamper in the road-car that meets us.'

So they went to the ruins. Vine, who, as a pioneer had seen the 'Temple's' torso s.h.a.ggy in bush and long gra.s.s, hardly knew it again. It had been shaven and shorn rather ruthlessly. Some of the ruins, he noted ungratefully, were numbered to correspond with a catalogue. There was, moreover, the glamorous sheen of a wire fence about the whole place.

A curator partic.i.p.ated as guide by special arrangement. A local celebrity accompanied him; he stood for the faith of Ophir, and smote the Egyptologist adversary not once nor twice alone. He confessed to the ladies of the party his conviction that the theory of an African origin was too inconceivably squalid. He stood for the gorgeous East, he said, as against Kaffirdom. He would not insult the culture that they brought with them by bothering them with detailed arguments.

Meanwhile another local celebrity was employed in bossing up some restoration work. Primitive walls were receiving trained modern attention, and medical attendance, regardless of expense.

Vine came to me at Umvuma when the Zimbabwe visitation was over and done. He was seeing his party off by the Salisbury train when he caught sight of me on the platform. That night he smoked and slept by an ox-wagon. Bread was to hand in rather frugal measure, but there was great plenty of monkey-nuts. There was also bush-tea, and Vine brought much tobacco. We smoked till long after the moon set, and that was near midnight. He told me of disappointments that had come to him through his pilgrimage being over well-appointed.

'After all,' I said, 'you might try again next year.'

'But a year's a lot at my age. I was forty-five last month, and I don't mean coming out again.

'So little done, so much to do, So many worlds, such things to be.'

'Where shall we go to this week?' he went on. 'I've got a week off from the Cook's combination. You'll give me the one week, won't you Shall we go to Dhlo-Dhlo or Nanatali or Sinoia Caves?

It's the curse of our Cook's tour that it's mopped up the sacred places I did want to see in a decent way the Grave, and the Temple, and the Falls.'

'Yours is the very sn.o.bbery of pilgrimage,' I told him sternly.

'There are surely shrines on the veld that have never yet got into a Chartered Company's guide-book.' I told him of a modest set of ruins out our way. I couldn't well come with him in any direction, north, south, or east or west, as he seemed to think I could. I might get in five days between Sunday and Sunday, if he chose our own neighborhood. He seemed glad enough to agree.

We cut food down and loads, and we started. We camped within the precincts of the shrine, hard by a place where a fire-fused chalice had been dug out. Ours was a fair camping-ground. A ring of kopjes about it wore the sun's colors. To the east a spruit was in sight, overhung in that autumn month by the mists of morning. Within those precincts we dreamed some temple-dreams on two golden afternoons, and slept temple-sleep on two very s.h.i.+ny nights.

'My reformed pilgrimage has justified itself,' Vine told me on the morning that we left, when we were making for my station.

'Wait a bit,' I said. 'We are arriving if all falls well, this very night at another shrine. We have not done with our Pilgrims'

Way.'

That night we came to the farm-house where the Kents farmed and missionized. I had expected Vine to like it and them, but I had not guessed how much attracted he would be. The Kents were not up-to-date, and they dressed as some people dressed in England twenty-five years before in the period of their leaving home.

So Mrs. Kent wore on that night a chocolate-brown Liberty costume of a Burne Jones pattern. Miss Kent was only twenty-two, and wore rose-color, but the design of her dress was her mother's own.

Kent wore an eighties collar with old-oak plaid and a red tie, I did not like his taste.

Vine sat and watched them with a reverential sort of gaze. He asked Kent when they were going home, thoughtfully. But Kent told him that they did not think of going home again, only up the coast to Zanzibar, or down to Inhambane, when they wanted change and holiday. 'That's splendid,' said Vine emphatically. 'Don't go home. It's not what it used to be. I feel sure you would not like it.'

After supper we had music, and Kent kept on singing, at Vine's particular request. I did not take much notice of what he was singing till Vine came and spoke to me. Then I saw how excited he was, and I listened with attention.

'Do you remember that?' he said. 'It was the song that Oriel man used to sing.' Then I recognized 'Our Last Waltz,' and afterwards 'In Sweet September.' I remembered both as the songs of a man whose wedding we both had attended, in the very year that we went down.

We shared a hut behind the mission homestead, and shared much converse before we slept.

'It's purple and gold,' Vine said. 'I came out to find a beastly ruin.'

'And you find the Victorian Sixth Decade mummified,' I said.

'Don't sneer!'

'Well, pressed in lavender,' I amended.

For early did'st thou leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without, Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.

'That describes Kent's Hegira, doesn't it? He's stopped where we two were, when we went down, in ever so many ways.'

'Hurray!' cried Vine, tossing his boot up, 'I came out to find a beastly ruin, and I've found my lost youth, nothing more nor less! Bless you!'

But his ecstasy was to culminate on the following morning. Kent had mounted him on one of his two mules, and piloted him on the other to see some Bush paintings three miles away.

I grew a little uneasy, they were so long gone, for I knew well what a lot of country lay between us and my own mission station.

I was due there by sunrise or soon after, on the morrow. Mrs.

Kent was strumming away on the piano old dance tunes that I remembered barrel-organ melodies of now remote days, days when a bi-weekly shave sufficed me. I stood in the doorway and beat time. Whenever were we going to get started at this rate? At last the mules came cantering up the wagon-road.

'Get a move on,' I shouted to Vine as he pulled up before the door. But just at that moment Mrs. Kent began on 'The Reign of the Roses.' Vine, who had kicked a foot out of its stirrup, did not dismount. He sat drinking in the dance-measure. Louder and louder she played the air, and, humming it over, he drove his foot home. Shaking up the reins, he cantered his mule round and round the sun-dial in front of the door. Round and round he went, still humming, while those wiry and sun-burnt wrists pounded away at the dance-music.

'How long is this going on?' I pleaded. I began to see the humor of the thing when I watched our carriers. They were gaping as at a new kind of circus. At last Mrs. Kent gave over, not very soon, however; the melody was evidently a favorite of hers.