Cinderella in the South: Twenty-Five South African Tales

by Arthur Shearly Cripps

And if the purgative fire seem so inevitable, why not warn its prospective fuel?

Granted the Love of Jesus (Who was certainly what South Africans would call a Jew Boy, Who was possibly so dark that any dorp school would have hummed over His admission, Who enrolled Himself in that House of David one of Whose ancestresses was the Hamitic Rahab apparently, Who took Ham's curse as well as Japheth's); granted that that Love is the one and only supreme motive for Christian Reform, yet for all that, facts are facts, and it may be kind to tell people into what fires the fires of Racialism threaten to merge their selves. On the whole, I am glad that our lay reader preached on that bright morning that over-gloomed sermon, preaching from my own soothing pulpit to my startled congregation. They did not seem to know what to make of it. But the preacher himself seemed quite unrepentant about it. He was talking to me about it that morning when we drove home again, he to his farm and I with him, to walk on to my mission. We outspanned in a very green valley, I remember, and sat long over roast monkey-nuts that his driver benignantly provided.

'The Lord put a word into my mouth,' my friend said quite firmly and simply. 'Was there not the cause the cause of a child's career? Didn't our Savior speak plainly as to the ugly analogy of the man drowned like a dog with a stone round his neck in the deep of the sea? Weren't His children in question when Jesus spoke; wasn't there a Christian child in question when I preached?'

I thought he made out something of a case for his position as a preacher of fiery doom. We were sitting on a beautiful green carpet. The Earth there had come through her bad time. Away on the hillside a black forbidding patch testified to the unpleasantness of the remedial stage. Away in the distance was a beautiful tree-shaded granite hill with much show of brown foliage and purplish underspaces. Just beside that hill the flames came driving (through the old last year's feed, I suppose). His eyes followed mine the way of the flames. 'Hurray!' he said heartily. 'Now we shan't be so very long surely after all. Don't you see the green grass on its way? It was a snug corner, verily, for the old dry stuff. Look, how the flames leap up in the thick of it! Not very juicy browse nor tasty feed, but fine fuel for the fire; good for that, anyway. It was a snug corner, but at last the time was ripe when the fire came driving straight for it the fire with the wind behind. 'Which things are a parable,' he said, his ugly sunburnt face twitching curiously, his eyes quite handsome, nay, even splendid with honest scorn. He was shaking his fist towards the prim little dorp that we had left behind over the ridges. 'No doubt but ye are the people,' he said, 'ye that have made the freedom of England and the franchise of Jesus of no effect by your tradition your sacrosanct tradition. What's the good of the frowsy old stuff? It must be some good; what is it? It isn't very good pasture for sheep or horses, not to speak of dairy cattle, but it's noble food for fire, don't you think?

There it lies-up so snug and sheltered and screened the old dead survival hidden in the prim little corrugated iron-roofed houses, and the narrow gumtree avenues, and the whitewashed Dutch tabernacle where they sing "Safe in the Arms of Jesus" (would you believe it?) But the time will come, it mayn't come in my day or in yours, but the time will come sure enough, when the Fire will trek dead straight for this old dead-ripe stuff, the Fire with the Wind behind. Then God have mercy on them whose work it was! For their work shall be burnt, aren't we sure of that? But as to they themselves being the sort to be saved so as by fire can we be so very sanguine? Meanwhile. . . . . . .

The way he so humbly appealed to me for my opinion on that moot point, did much to conciliate me. He had not carried me with him all the while. He seemed to me a bit out of date, too like an ante-Christian prophet. Yet how my heart went out to him as he ended up so very abruptly with his 'meanwhile.' His voice broke queerly, and his eyes shone. 'Meanwhile they may manage to give a child or two a rough passage. They've got pluck enough for that, the blighters, haven't they?' He turned away from me with a sort of a sob. 'The time'll come sure enough, but it's their time now, and they know it,' he said. 'God pity her!'

'LA BELLE DAME'

Inhabiting this country you inhabit the Middle Ages, you dwell in the wild Marchlands without the pale of Christendom. Here a man may take to the forest roads in the old spirit of errantry. How darkly the shadow of witchcraft falls upon the path; we might be in Lapland or Thessaly! What strange satyr voices the drums have of nights! I suppose it is the reading about such things long ago that gives me this sense of having been here before, of having come back to this country!'

His eyes glistened as he sat over his wine, and smoked Transvaal tobacco in a calabash pipe. He looked much more as he used to look twenty years back, I thought. I had deemed him aged almost out of recognition when first we sat down to dinner. He had come up to Mashonaland with some learned association on a holiday trip. His name was Gerald Browne; he had lectured on English literature these many years in an ancient northern university.

With him came his wife, a very plain and quiet lady, and also an undergraduate pupil named Drayton.