We were about a mile away from the town, and between us and it stretched an emblazoned sea—an extravagant, brilliant champs Élysée of terrible colour.
In the first mushroom uprising of the town the little hospital had stood where now our huts were built, and a young nurse, receiving a packet of zinia seed from home, had, in the innocence of her heart, planted it at the doors of the hospital, to cheer the patients, she said; but in time it had frightened the patients.
Any one who knows anything about zinias need not be told that they want nothing more than a shower and some sunny days to bloom gaily, and thereafter fling their seed in turn to the four winds. That is what Nurse Agnes’s zinias had done, and now between the camp and the town billowed an iridescent ocean of colour. And such colour! Atrocious blues and reds and terra-cottas and pinks and magentas, all cheek by jowl, and head to head. Perky little stiff-stalked wretches, blazing wickedly in the sun. I detested them. The natural flowers of Africa never clash with each other, or the skies, or the changing scarlets and ambers of the veldt. But these malapert immigrants sinned against all laws and canons of colour. They struck the eye a thousand blows a minute. They disturbed the splendour of the skies. There was no peace in the distant hills because of them.
Close beside us was the police camp: a bevy of huts built round a large open space, with the stumps of chopped-down trees for occasional seats. A sergeant and ten troopers came and went on the zinia-lined road, patrolling the neighbouring kraals and visiting the town. From our hut doors we could see the men busy with their horses at morning and evening “stables,” and on Sunday nights they usually chanted Barrack-room Ballads round their fires to hymn tunes played on a concertina. They were an ill-kempt, casual, careless lot of men, but fine looking fellows and all of them well-born ne’er-do-wells. The only one among them who had no claim by birth to the title of gentleman was Locke, the smart and spruce sergeant in charge of them under Maurice.
Life with Maurice Stair was too lively and active a misery to be truthfully described as dreary. It was more difficult than climbing the Dent blanche with bare and broken feet, or wandering waterless in the burning desert; for there was no glorious peak in sight up the steep and rugged path, nor any oases to rest by in the weary desert, nor any hope of “Death, the tardy friend” overtaking one’s faltering footsteps. I was too young and strong to hope for death, even while I felt that youth was being left far behind in the shadow of happier days, and age crouched somewhere in the tangled thorny wild in front. And always, always, the terrible regret for the passing of days that held nothing in them! Empty days—empty nights! Life was not meant to be passed thus, and life was passing!
“The wine of life was falling drop by drop;
The leaves of life were fading one by one!”
Maurice spent little of his time at the police camp. His duties as commanding officer did not oppress him. He rarely went near his men. The sergeant came to the house with all papers and reports, and Maurice conducted the affairs of the Government in his bedroom, often from his bed, for which he had a fondness.
As Public Prosecutor he was obliged to go over to the court-house every morning at ten, but it was usually nearer eleven when he rode away, looking like a modern Galahad on his white horse. There is no doubt he was a very handsome fellow.
His duties at the court-house did not keep him long, there being little more to do than to produce certain Mashonas who had been brought in by the troopers for refusing to pay the hut-tax (ten shillings a year) and thereafter to be sentenced to a month’s labour at Government work. Sometimes there was a cattle-stealer to face his crimes, or a breaker of his brother’s skull in some kraal revel. Whatsoever the cases they did not detain Maurice long. He soon came riding gallantly back through the zinias, to the hours of idleness that his soul loved. He would fling off his uniform, get into a pair of shrunken flannel trousers, and in his shirt sleeves and a pair of atrocious black leather slippers spend the rest of the day pottering. He was the most successful potterer I ever met. Sauntering from one hut to the other, he was never far from his own. He may or may not have believed that I did not know the reason for this; but I must have been deaf and blind and lacking in all my seven senses not to know of the case after case of whiskey that was carried to his hut and consumed there in solitude. Yet he still kept up the pose of being a man who did not drink, and when I had the tantalus filled with spirits and placed openly in the dining-room he looked at me with surprise, and asked me whether I realised that whiskey was five pounds a case!