My host and I exchanged a few undertones. Tomorrow was Whitsunday. I wanted to have Service very early. 'That'll be all right,' he said. Soon he put our hurricane lamp out, but I was not to win sleep for quite a long while. In the early morning, moreover, something happened. Some red-ant skirmishers were about, and I had a hot time in my bed on the floor. I' might well have felt more grateful than I did feel. Yes, had I only known what battalions would have engaged me, had they decided to attack before dawn! At dawn I was to see for myself what were the numbers of their host. Meanwhile, their scouts gave me trouble, if only a moderate amount. A cock crowed close by. Then another and another. The dawn was not so very far then surely. The thunder that had boomed when I first awoke, boomed louder. A rushing mighty wind seized upon the shanty where we slept, a very airy shanty. The fact that the Day that came was Pentecost, recurred to me. Then the storm broke in fury. The rain smashed down, and the lightning forked and flickered. The roar and tumult raged and swelled and thudded overhead. My host awakened.
'It's near,' he said. 'Too near for me,' I murmured, as I ducked involuntarily when a perfervid flash came.
'Look at the Navy!' he said. I looked.
The cynic slept like a child. His face was very calm and intensely optimistic. 'He told me he had slept through big guns' fire on his ship,' I said admiringly. 'He has great powers.'
A curious lingering flash came. It played round the sleeper's head. A huge peal seemed to come almost with it, the last huge peal ere that brief passionate storm withdrew.
Then the sleeper began to talk.
He talked too well too well for me to mix his actual phrases up with this secular story.
The Intelligence man began to laugh. The thing struck him as funny. But suddenly I caught familiar words, and I put my finger on my lips. My host's black eyes looked into mine, and I saw, as I had never seen before, how much there was in them. First they kindled, and then they grew soft, and he turned his head away. The sleeper had been repeating the end of the fifth chapter of S. Matthew the bit about the God (whose sons we Christians are) that makes His sun to shine, and His rain to fall so impartially.
He said the words very clearly, as articulately as if he were a child saying repetition. What made our host's eyes melt so curiously was what came after.
The sleeper said a sort of child's prayer about sun and rain, and just and unjust, and good and evil, praying quite simply to God to bless everybody and to do the best for them English and Germans, black men and white.