'I mean a supreme vindication of our holy cause,' amended the
Superintendent with conviction.
Then they changed the subject.
Afterwards, when they smoked late on the lamp-lit stoep, conversation was apt to flag a little. The layman's eyes would grow abstracted in the intervals of his ceremonious hospitality. The Superintendent watched his face intently once or twice. The man was a mystery to him. He had an uneasy sense that he had not taken his measure, and had been responsible for some sort of a misfit more than once in conversation. Why was he not more like ordinary people? Probably because he had lived a lonely life on the veld much too long. The Superintendent was conscious of a profound distrust of the untamed veld, its influence and its inhabitants. Yet his natural kindliness, reinforced assuredly by his grace of orders and Christian sense of duty, strove quite heroically against that distrust.
David Osborne walked over to see me next week, but he did not find me at home; I was camping with a native teacher's wagon some twenty miles away.
He slept at my place, and came on after me. A thirty miles' tramp or so it meant to overtake me, but he did not shrink from it. He wanted to think out things, and he liked foot-slogging on a big scale as a stimulus to thought. I was on a high ledge above the windings of the Sawi River when he found me a ledge with a great view of the Wedza hills. The sun was going down then, and their blue was just dying into purple. I got him some tea, and he drank and ate like a veldsman one who had broken his journey but little since he broke his morning fast. He told me the Superintendent's point of view, which I have already chronicled. 'It provides a certain amount of excuse,' Osborne said, 'for what I want to do. That's about all I can say for it.'
'Then you want to go?' I asked.
'I want a change,' he said, 'and adventures and all that. As to any war's being a holy war, that's Greek to me.' I smiled. I understood what he meant.
I had only just come back from a limited experience of war as a non-combatant. 'Why don't you say outright what you think?' he pressed me. 'The Superintendent does do that apparently, I'll say that much for him. Isn't Saint Telemachus still your bright particular star of Christian sainthood in wartime? And isn't Tolstoy still in your eyes a sort of forlorn hope the most hopeful of modern war-time philosophers? Or have you changed all that?'
I looked him straight in the eyes, considering.
'I have changed,' I said. He looked at me hopefully. He hadn't seen me since I had come back from the war. 'So the holy war's all right?' he asked. 'And the acolyte to the altar of freedom and all that sort of thing? I attach some importance to your opinion, remember, so don't say more than you mean. Having seen war, which do you plump for? Tolstoy, Saint Telemachus, or the Superintendent? Speak now, and kiss the Book on it.'