It was some time before they had so quieted as to continue their interrogations of the visitors. “Well, you have not told us what this white man is like,” called a voice from the back of the crowd.
“No, I have not,” replied the visitor, “because Tata stopped our talk with his horrible charges against the white men. This man who is coming is a white man, and you have all seen white men. This one is neither short nor tall, he has no beard, but he has tin saucepans to cook his food in, and a funny thing called a frying-pan, which always makes a lot of noise when it is put on the fire. He is a dirty white man, for the two days he was in our village he never washed more than his hands and face, and he smells just like all the other white men.”[[23]] And the speaker and others held their noses with expressions of exaggerated disgust.
“I do not think he is dirty,” chimed in one of the listeners. “When I was last at the coast I asked one of the white man’s boys if his master was dirty, and he said: ‘No, he takes a bath every day in his house.’ You see this white man is travelling, and has no bath-house with him, and consequently in front of you he only washes his hands and face.“
“Oh, is that it? Perhaps you are right,” answered the visitor in an unconvinced voice.
“I will tell you something else,” continued the first speaker. “Once when I was at the coast I was talking to one of the interpreters there about this very matter--the smell emitted by white men; and he said: ‘They give off a bad odour, I know, but one day I heard one of the white traders say: “Those wretched niggers do stink badly!”’ So after all it may be that we smell as badly to them as they do to us, therefore we must not complain.”
The man with the plaited beard eyed the speaker for a few moments in angry contempt, and then he burst out at him in such a tirade that I feared his words would choke him.
“You dog,” he cried, “you witch, are you in the pay of the white man that you should thus speak for him? You white man,[[24]] you bewitched our chief to death; not Mavakala, I always said he was innocent and he vomited the ordeal three times, yet they would kill him; but you are the witch; you sold our chief’s spirit to these cursed white men, and now he is slaving for them, and we shall all die through your witchcraft and greed.”
By the time the old man had finished his invectives the two chief actors in this scene were standing by themselves in a circle of anxious, terror-stricken faces. They were types of the old order and the new--the old order, slaves to witch-doctors, charms and superstitions that demanded the continuance of things as they are; the new order, men and lads upon whose minds new ideas were dawning and struggling for the mastery against their crude, superstitious fears,--men who were yearning for they knew not what, and were restless through strange strivings in their hearts.
There, flooded by the glorious, soft moonlight, stood the two men glaring at each other. Murder was in their hearts, and their hands were on their knives. A few moments more and the pent-up feelings of the surging crowd would have burst their strained barriers and much blood would have been shed, for each had his adherents, when Satu, the chief, stepped between the two men.
He was still dressed in mourning for his brother, and the thick coating of oil and soot on his face--a sign of his sorrow, had not yet been removed. He was a superstitious man and much travelled, a man in whose soul what-he-had-seen was struggling with his ignorant, superstitious fears.