Chapter Twenty Six.
Our Various Ways.
When the trip was squared off and the boys paid, there was nothing left. Jim went home with waggons returning to Spitzkop: once more—for the last time—grievously hurt in dignity because his money was handed to my friend the owner of the waggon to be paid out to him when he reached his kraal; but his gloomy resentment melted as I handed over to him things for which there was no further need. The waggons moved off, and Jim with them; but twice he broke back again to dance and shout his gratitude; for it was wealth to him to have the reims and voorslag, the odd yokes and strops and waggon tools, the baking pot and pan and billies; and they were little to me when all else was gone. And Jim, with all his faults, had earned some title to remembrance for his loyalty. My way had been his way; and the hardest day had never been too hard for him: he had seen it all through to the finish, without a grumble and without a shirk.
His last shout, like the bellow of a bull, was an uproarious good-bye to Jock. And Jock seemed to know it was something of an occasion, for, as he stood before me looking down the road at the receding waggons and the dancing figure of Jim, his ears were cocked, his head was tilted a little sideways, and his tail stirred gently. It was at least a friendly nod in return!
A couple of weeks later I heard from my friend: “You will be interested to hear that that lunatic of yours reached his kraal all right; but that’s not his fault. He is a holy terror. I have never known such a restless animal: he is like a change in the weather—you seem to feel him everywhere, upsetting everything and every one the whole time. I suppose you hammered him into his place and kept him there; but I wouldn’t have him at a gift. It is not that there was anything really wrong; only there was no rest, no peace.
“But he’s a gay fighter! That was a treat: I never laughed so much in my life. Below the Devil’s Kantoor we met a lot of waggons from Lydenburg, and he had a row with one of the drivers, a lanky nigger with dandy-patched clothes. The boy wouldn’t fight—just yelled blue murder while Jim walloped him. I heard the yells and the whacks, like the beating of carpets, and there was Jim laying it on all over him—legs, head, back, and arms—with a sort of ferocious satisfaction, every whack being accompanied by a husky suppressed shout: ‘Fight, Shangaan! Fight!’ But the other fellow was not on for fighting; he floundered about, yelled for mercy and help, and tried to run away; but Jim simply played round him—one spring put him alongside each time. I felt sorry for the long nigger and was going to interfere and save him, but just then one of his pals called out to their gang to come along and help, and ran for his sticks. It was rare fun then. Jim dropped the patched fellow and went like a charging lion straight for the waggons where the gang were swarming for their sticks, letting out right and left whenever he saw a nigger, whether they wanted to fight or not; and in about five seconds the whole lot were heading for the bush with Jim in full chase.
“Goodness knows what the row was about. As far as I can make out from your heathen, it is because the other boy is a Shangaan and reads the Bible. Jim says this boy—Sam is his name—worked for you and ran away. Sam says it is not true, and that he never even heard of you, and that Jim is a stranger to him. There’s something wrong in this, though, because when the row began, Sam first tried to pacify your lunatic, and I heard him sing out in answer to the first few licks, ‘Kahle, Umganaam; Kahle, Makokel’!’ (Gently, friend; gently, Makokel’.) ‘Wow, Makokela, y’ ou bulala mena!’ (Wow, Makokela, you will kill me.) He knew Jim right enough; that was evident. But it didn’t help him; he had to skip for it all the same. I was glad to pay the noble Jim off and drop him at his kraal. Sam was laid up when we left.”
It is better to skip the change from the old life to the new—when the luck, as we called it, was all out, when each straw seemed the last for the camel’s breaking back, and there was always still another to come. But the turn came at last, and the ‘long arm of coincidence’ reached out to make the ‘impossible’ a matter of fact. It is better to skip all that: for it is not the story of Jock, and it concerns him only so far that in the end it made our parting unavoidable.
When the turn did come it was strange, and at times almost bewildering, to realise that the things one had struggled hardest against and regarded as the worst of bad luck were blessings in disguise and were all for the best. So the new life began and the old was put away; but the new life, for all its brighter and wider outlook and work of another class, for all the charm that makes Barberton now a cherished memory to all who knew the early days, was not all happy. The new life had its hours of darkness too; of almost unbearable ‘trek fever’; of restless, sleepless, longing for the old life; of ‘home-sickness’ for the veld, the freedom, the roaming, the nights by the fire, and the days in the bush! Now and again would come a sleepless night with its endless procession of scenes, in which some remembered from the past were interlinked with others imagined for the future; and here and there in these long waking dreams came stabs of memory—flashes of lightning vividness: the head and staring eyes of the koodoo bull, as we had stood for a portion of a second face to face; the yawning mouth of the maddened crocodile; the mamba and its beady hateful eyes, as it swept by before the bush fire. And there were others too that struck another chord: the cattle, the poor dumb beasts that had worked and died: stepping-stones in a man’s career; the ‘books,’ the ‘chalk and blackboard’ of the school—used, discarded, and forgotten! No, they were not forgotten; and the memory of the last trek was one long mute reproach on their behalf: they had paved the roadway for the Juggernaut man.
All that was left of the old life was Jock; and soon there was no place for him. He could not always be with me; and when left behind he was miserable, leading a life that was utterly strange to him, without interest and among strangers. While I was in Barberton he accompanied me everywhere, but—absurd as it seems—there was a constant danger for him there, greater though less glorious than those he faced so lightly in the veld. His deafness, which passed almost unnoticed and did not seem to handicap him at all in the veld, became a serious danger in camp. For a long time he had been unable to hear a sound, but he could feel sounds: that is to say, he was quick to notice anything that caused a vibration. In the early days of his deafness I had been worried by the thought that he would be run over while lying asleep near or under the waggons, and the boys were always on the look-out to stir him up; but we soon found that this was not necessary. At the first movement he would feel the vibration and jump up. Jim realised this well enough, for when wishing to direct his attention to strange dogs or Shangaans, the villain could always dodge me by stamping or hammering on the ground, and Jock always looked up: he seemed to know the difference between the sounds he could ignore, such as chopping wood, and those that he ought to notice.