So clanged the bell, the bell in the market tower, the tower of the dismantled pioneer fort. And it seemed to me that I saw Malaria a lean yellow ague-shaken shape with a Cape-boy sort of face, steal away out of the town past the new Railway Station, and across the river. He went, like a frightened Kaffir dog with a jackal-like yelp, far away into the Veld. I am not sure whether he did not become canine on the way, at least cynocephalous. I followed him. I went far in that following, over country that I remember as very difficult, there were so many stumps of trees about. Moreover, it had abundance of black-jacks to stud one's socks with. 'He is going through dry places seeking rest,' I thought. 'Soon he will return.' And sure enough we were to return by-and by. And a jackal pack of seven, that I was somehow expecting to come, came with us. We saw the lights of Alexandra soon, but the people had gone to bed, it seemed. There was no one about anywhere. Then the leading jackal fed foul and lapped long at a great black drain. Afterwards he howled under a window of the Hospital, and leaped through it, straddling his legs. Then I awoke.
I married Marvell on the following Monday, and partook of his wedding-lunch. He made a far more florescent speech than that earlier one, it compared with it as the nuptial champagne with Miller's bottled beer.
'The old Pioneer is now dead,' he told us, 'as dead as the Dodo or the Great Auk. No longer need we take Quinine to be "our grim chamberlain to usher us and draw" . . .' (here his memory of Hood failed him). 'No more need we shiver in our Kaffir blankets at Kaffir Stores 'fifty miles from the dead-ends of rail-less post-towns. "Le roi est mort." Malaria is dead or dying so far as Alexandra is concerned. We Alexandrians are now becoming wholesome Englishmen in a wholesome White Man's country. Long live the railway, and may it perforate the Alexandra District!' 'Amen,' said the best-man fervently. But I said nothing.
I admired Marvell. It was just like him to press a guinea on me for my Mission, though I told him there was no fee of any kind, and that I was ever so glad to be there. The remembrance of my dream stung me. I said something for conscience sake. 'Civilization has its perils,' I said dully, 'immature civilization. The period between no-drains and the up-to-date drainage system wants some living through.' 'That's all right,' Marvell declared. 'I'll watch it. I didn't go through Bloemfontein in the War for nothing.'
'Le roi est mort: vive le roi! 'Alack! If Malaria slackened hold, enteric tightened its clutch. People were found to say that the latter state of Alexandra was worse than the former. Marvell and Rose Marvell both got enteric. But, thank God, the uneasy misgivings engendered by that eight-devil dream of mine about Alexandra were not justified! They both won through. They are going back to England for a change next month (the hay-making month at home), they tell me.
'God made the country, and man made the town, and the devil made the little railway-swollen, transitional, Alexandra-sort-of-town.' So Marvell wrote to me by last mail. He is not so keen now on the transition stage of civilization for his wife's residence. He is thinking of a pioneer place in Northern Rhodesia, either that or London. If the perils of the old regime in Alexandra are diminished, the perils of the new regime appear to have a knack of growing.
THE RIDING OF THE RED HORSE
I
Isaka rubbed his eyes, but he did not unroll himself yet out of his blankets. He was lying in the darkness with a round of white walls dimly seen about him. Through a hole in the grass roof, a star met his fixed gaze. The cocks had but just crowed the second time, and the light was but just winning way in the east. The night was holding out steadily so far.
Was it he, Isaka, who had awakened, or some other? He was not very clear. Strange alike looked the happiness behind, and the hope before him. He was not sure of himself in that twilight of his senses. It seemed scarcely believable his title to either gift of heaven to memory or to expectation.