“There is going to be a noise, I expect, but it won’t be much. It is only a lot of niggers come up to call me out and protest about the crops. Can you load a revolver?”
“Yes!”
“Well, do so, and shoot as many blacks as you like. The more the better. There is a revolver in the second drawer of that table, and cartridges.”
“Won’t you have it?”
“No; this will do for me. I should like to flay half-a-dozen, and teach them how the Kaffirs die under this thing!” The shambok quivered ominously, and the roused blood in his veins was evidently finding an outlet in the hope of savage assault. She shuddered a little as his large gaunt figure vanished through the window on to the stoep.
The “deputation” that Halton had foretold was a motley crowd, and by sheer force of numbers rather than belligerence, had pushed the sentry aside and swarmed up to the house in an unorganised attack. Amongst the half-drunken niggers who were dancing amicably amongst themselves instead of forming up with the semblance of an opposing force, the little blue figures of the Chinese were visible, and all the anger of the assembly seemed to be concentrated in them. As Gregory stalked on to the stoep the clamour rose, the half-hysterical ribaldry of the blacks clearing to threats and words, and the Chinamen jabbering like monkeys. Through it all the cry of the Malagasy “Ra!” (blood) cut the tumult like a clear bass note.
The Administrator leaned over the rail, gripping it with his lean hands, and looking down at the upturned faces with his hard stare. The insolence of his attitude seemed to half rouse, half tame the crowd. They wavered, but the sing-song snarl which Mrs. Lewin had heard in the hour of the Miroro, went on like an accompaniment to the crickets. Words were indistinguishable, but some one on the outskirts of the throng flung a cocoanut which hit the zinc roofing of the stoep, and, as if it were a signal, half-a-dozen blue figures swarmed over the railing and made a rush for Gregory. Leoline had moved by instinct nearer the window, with the loaded revolver in her hand. She remembered that Halton had said that Gregory loved a row, for she heard him laugh shortly, as if in enjoyment of his own excitement, while he stepped back and awaited them. No other missile was flung as she expected it would be, but she wondered if the crowd were armed with razors as the rioters had been before. Then she saw a curious sight, for the first of the Chinamen to approach too near was caught by the swing of the supple shambok and fell on his back with the breath knocked out of him, and Gregory advanced on the others, literally sweeping the stoep clear again by the force of his swinging blows. The hide whickered viciously as it cut the still air, and once a shriek answered its awful “Whir-r-r-r-r-h!” telling how the blow had caught its victim. The absolute and savage contempt with which he whipped them off the stoep, like curs, gave the woman watching him a revelation of the abhorrence in which the Englishman really holds the alien, and especially after many years spent amongst coloured races. She had met with something of it in her husband, and learned more from Captain Gilderoy’s frank brutality in speaking of them; but now she saw and realised. Gregory kicked the last man into the garden and came back to her laughing horribly. The curious part to her was that they did not resist, and he did not even wait to see the humming crowd melt away into the darkness as it was fast doing.
“If there were any organisation among them they might be worth killing,” he said, taking the revolver from her. “As it is I would have made an example of one of those Chinamen—shamboked him so that he would brew no hashish!—if you had not been there. But it’s not a pretty sight.”
“Are they gone?” she asked with stiff lips. The march of events seemed to have stunned her. She had a sick feeling that she could bear no more, and that she had lived through crisis after crisis in a few hours, which would in an ordinary way be spread over as many years.
“They will be in a few minutes, but if you will excuse me I will just go and give orders to see that the grounds are quite clear before you walk back.”