Why did I understand? I wondered. Was the lure of Africa on me too? Was this strange brown land of golden days, and crimson and orange eventides, and purple nights, calling to me? Would it keep me as he had said it always kept people who felt the lure and heard the call? At the thought I trembled a little, and felt afraid of I knew not what. Afterwards I laughed to myself at the absurdity of the thought. How could Africa keep me? I belonged to the civilised cities of the world. My home was in Paris, London, Dublin, sometimes New York. I had lived always amongst pictures, and sculpture, and books, beautiful music, lovely clothes, jewels. All these things were necessary to me. I could not contemplate life without them. Africa was only an interlude—an experience. In a few months I should be back again hunting with the Meath pack from our dear little box near Balbriggan; flying over to London for balls and Hurlingham, or with my pretty Aunt Betty van Alen in her Paris studio, entertaining her and her friends with the strange tale of my adventures in this strange land. How ridiculous to fancy that I could feel the thrilling pain of a claw in my heart—Africa’s claw! What was Africa to me or I to Africa?
I shivered. There were mists rising everywhere now, and joining the clouds of dust they wove gauzy scarfs about us and white things moved before us on the road, like spectres showing the way.
The sunshine that I loved so much was gone! It was my passion for sunshine and blue skies that had brought me for a time to this barbaric land. My passion for sunshine that I had never really been able to indulge to the full, until the crushing failure of a great bank in America had transformed me from an heiress into just an ordinary girl with a few hundreds a year whom the world no longer concerned itself particularly about.
That was one of the strange events that had occurred to change my life and swallow up many vivid memories. First my lovely and much loved mother, the one parent I could remember, had died, passing away softly in her sleep one night and looking so happy—almost gay—as she lay there dead, that it had seemed wrong to regret what had happened and the blow had thus been robbed of half its terror and pain. Then, directly afterwards, had come the banking disaster, sweeping away the great fortune my mother had left and leaving nothing from the wreckage but a few thousands to be divided between my brother Dick and me. That had been the end of my fashionable career, and when I realised it I rejoiced with an exceeding great joy, for it was a life that, as the French put it, had “never said anything to me.” Immediately the future had become far more interesting. Hundreds of people whom I had never cared a button about, but whom I had been obliged to meet and smile with, “and gladly endure,” dropped instantly out of my life and I never saw them again. The horizon became a blank canvas that I might fill in with any figures I liked against any background I chose. Well! the background I chose was sunshine, which I sought in many out-of-the-way places where sunshine abounds, and the people I let into my picture were all the odd, charming creatures I met in my travels and the delightful writers and painters and sculptors who made up the world of my Aunt Betty van Alen, herself a gifted sculptress and a beautiful Bohemian soul. She had been appointed my guardian by my mother, and we spent most of our time together, only, a true American, she never could be drawn very far from her beloved Paris. However, she was American in this, too, that she considered the world as free to women as to men, and that no harm could come to a self-reliant girl who had been well brought up and taught black from white. So that when she could not be with me herself she suffered no qualms in letting me go off on my excursions alone, and was perfectly satisfied that I should never come to any harm. She was of opinion that every true-born American girl has her head so well balanced and such a fine sense of beauty and the fitness of things that she could never step from the paths of wisdom, or stray from that straight white road that her religion and early training had laid down for her; that the more you trust an American girl the more she is trustworthy. And I think she was right. But what she never took into account with me was that though my mother was American and I had been born under the Stars and Stripes, my father’s half of me was Irish, and Irish drops in the blood spell love of adventure, love of the extraordinary in people and places and things, love of beauty, and lots of other loves, that not only cause one exquisite pleasure that is more than half pain, but lead one into many strange places where convention is not. However, I never told her or any one else of these things. Indeed it was only dimly that I realised them for myself.
On this visit to Africa, so very far away from her, Betty had unexpectedly held out rather firmly about the necessity of a chaperon, and to please her I had travelled out with a frumpy old German governess we had both known many years, who was visiting Africa to see about some property an uncle had left her in the Transvaal. All the way out I had made it quite plain to Madame von Stohl that I meant to go up to Mashonaland and see my brother Dick, that in fact it was one of my chief reasons for coming to Africa at all; and she never said a word against the idea. But lo! after I had trailed around with her to all sorts of uninteresting places in Cape Colony and the Transvaal she calmly and firmly refused to fulfil her part of the programme and go with me to Mashonaland. She said she was afraid of being eaten by Lobengula, the King of the Matabele.
The only thing to do, then, was to make my own plans and enquiries. Every one told me it was a journey of the very roughest and wildest description, and that very few women had done it before. It appeared that there were already a great number of women in Mashonaland, but they had all travelled up by waggon, with their men-folks to look after them, taking about three months to accomplish the journey. Instead of this information daunting me, as it was evidently meant to do, it made me only the more eager for such an adventure. Therefore, when I heard one man remarking to another (through the open window of the Johannesburg Hotel where we were staying) that if I took that coach journey alone it would take the curl out of my hair, I merely felt sorry for the man:—first, because he never would and never could know that my hair curled naturally, and secondly, that he should have so poor an opinion of an Irish-American girl as to think that a few rough adventures would scare her from a plan on which she had set her heart. In any case it was really no business of his. But Africa is chock full of people who mind your business for you as well as large quantities of their own. At first I was amazed and indignant at the number of utter strangers who came along and tried to interfere with my contemplated journey. Later I learned to listen, in the same spirit as it was given, to advice that was not really meant for anything but friendly information and a touching interest in the mistakes of other people. And when I smiled at them and told them that I loved adventures and couldn’t get enough of them, the men gazed at me with admiration, mingled (they told me) with a longing to start for Mashonaland by the same coach, and the women looked wistful but denied their longing to follow my example.
As for Madame von Stohl, she refused to budge from her comfortable quarters in the Johannesburg hotel. I was secretly delighted, for anything more tiresome than a fortnight’s unmitigated von Stohl in the cramped-up space of a coach I could not imagine. But I felt it my duty to reproach her. She thereupon in great irritation made some not at all agreeable remarks about the unfortunate fate of persons descended from two entirely irresponsible nations, without any sense of duty towards society, a craving for excitement, and no proper regard for the conventions of civilised life.
She said all this whilst I was packing my prettiest gowns for Fort Salisbury, and I, with the light heart of a girl who knows she is going to get her own way, responded with some cheerful reflections on heavy pudding-headed Teutons who had not an ounce of nous in the whole of their make-up, were absolutely lacking in imagination and the spirit of adventure, and simply did not know the meaning of joie de vivre. What was the use, I demanded, of sticking in Johannesburg and all the other stupid imitation towns and imagining we were seeing real Africa?
“One might just as well be in England or Germany, except that life in Europe is more comfortable and not so expensive. What I want to see—besides Dick, of course—is the illimitable veldt, and Brother Boer, and prowling lions, and Lobengula’s fifty wives.”
Elizabet von Stohl had answered that her desire was not unto these things. I then, having pitifully but very firmly told her that of course she could not help having been born a German, went out and telegraphed to Dick to come down to Johannesburg and fetch me. I thought I would give convention a fair deal. However, he wired back: