Cinderella in the South: Twenty-Five South African Tales

by Arthur Shearly Cripps

'I saw their starved lips in the gloom With horrid warning gaped wide, And I awoke and found me here On the cold hill's side.'

I asked a question: 'What will Browne like for breakfast,
Drayton?'

'If he's come back to his civilized tastes, you'd better open that tin of sausages,' he said. 'You've got some squish, too, haven't you? Don't give him that bush-tea of yours!'

I was up long before Drayton. I had secured Browne's confidences before the sun had been risen an hour. 'I've had a sort of miserable ague,' he said. 'A cold and hot fever has been plaguing me. Some part of this last night has been savagely horrible. But I've sweated pounds of my weight away, and my fever's gone. Strange, isn't it?'

'Quite ordinary in this part of Africa,' I said, sharply and minimizingly. I handed him a shirt, and he doffed his drenched one. He did not tell me any more just then. His eyes watched me in a dazed, miserable way. I asked him to excuse me, and went off with Johannes to my service. When I came back his eyes were clearer, they had less of their look of wan-hope.

'Sinister country, this Africa,' he said. 'I was infatuated with her yesterday. Today I can't understand just what the attraction was. Her desolate moors seemed to make me drunk. See how she's served me! I never felt quite so sick as I've done most of this last day and night. Just before I woke it seemed to me I saw them in my dreams tens and twenties of her victims; men she's charmed and led on and on, and demoralized, ruined, killed and buried, and helped down-hill the way of the bottomless pit. I am better now; but I'm shaken. How thankful I'll be if only I get out of her, and can only stop thinking about her after that.'

I listened with grave attention. Then I gave him some bread and sausages, and he ate away ravenously. How ever many cups of tea did he drink afterwards?'

The above was all the avowal that Browne made to me. I do not think that he said nearly as much to Drayton as he did to me. Drayton plied me with questions that night, and I told him too much, to my regret.

Months afterwards a copy of an undergraduate paper, containing a fantasia on the events that I have recorded, reached me. It comprised much African coloring and some little humor. I wonder if it reached Browne or Mrs. Browne?

We got Browne home in little over a day. He hurried on, oftentimes when we wanted to rest. He seemed as anxious to emerge from the African desert as he had been to explore the deeps of it. He looked rakish and wretched as he bumped about upon his mule. His face was livid, and his black beard, that he used to cut so formally, desperately out of trim. His eyes were strangely bloodshot.