When the meat was there I gave it, and he would sit by the fire for hours eating incredible quantities—cutting it off in slabs and devouring it when not much more than warmed. But it was not always possible to satisfy him in that way; meat was expensive in the towns and often we had none at all at the waggons. Then the night became one long torment: the spells of rest might extend from a quarter of an hour to an hour; then from the dead sleep of downright weariness I would be roused by the deep far-reaching voice; “Funa ’nyama, Inkos” wove itself into my dreams, and waking I would find Jim standing beside me remorselessly urging the same request in Zulu, in broken English, and in Dutch—“My wanta meat, Baas,” “Wil fleisch krij, Baas,” and the old, old, hatefully familiar explanation of the difference between “man’s food” and “piccanins’ food,” interspersed with grandiose declarations that he was “Makokela—Jim Makokel’,” who “catchum lion ’live.” Sometimes he would expand this into comparisons between himself and the other boys, much to their disadvantage; and on these occasions he invariably worked round to his private grievances, and expressed his candid opinions of Sam.
Sam was the boy whom I usually set to do Jim’s neglected work. He was a ‘mission boy,’ that is a Christian kaffir—very proper in his behaviour, but a weakling and not much good at work. Jim would enumerate all Sam’s shortcomings; how he got his oxen mixed up on dark nights and could not pick them out of the herd—a quite unpardonable offence; how he stuck in the drifts and had to be ‘double-spanned’ and pulled out by Jim; how he once lost his way in the bush; and how he upset the waggon coming down the Devil’s Shoot.
Jim had once brought down the Berg from Spitzkop a loaded waggon on which there was a cottage piano packed standing upright. The road was an awful one, it is true, and few drivers could have handled so top-heavy a load without capsizing—he had received a bansela for his skill—but to him the feat was one without parallel in the history of waggon driving; and when drunk he usually coupled it with his other great achievement of catching a lion alive. His contempt for Sam’s misadventure on the Devil’s Shoot was therefore great, and to it was added resentment against Sam’s respectability and superior education, which the latter was able to rub in in safety by ostentatiously reading his Bible aloud at nights as they sat round the fire. Jim was a heathen, and openly affirmed his conviction that a Christian kaffir was an impostor, a bastard, and a hypocrite—a thing not to be trusted under any circumstances whatever. The end of his morose outburst was always the same. When his detailed indictment of Sam was completed he would wind up with, “My catchum lion ’live. My bling panyanna fon Diskop (I bring piano from Spitzkop). My naam Makokela: Jim Makokel’. Sam no good; Sam leada Bible (Sam reads the Bible). Sam no good!” The intensity of conviction and the gloomy disgust put into the last reference to Sam are not to be expressed in words.
Where warning and punishment availed nothing threats would have been worse than foolish. Once, when he had broken bounds and left the waggons, I threatened that if he did it again I would tie him up, since he was like a dog that could not be trusted; and I did it. He had no excuse but the old ones; some one, he said, had brought him liquor to the waggons and he had not known what he was doing. The truth was that the craving grew so with the nearer prospect of drink that by hook or by crook he would find some one, a passerby or a boy from other waggons, to fetch some for him; and after that nothing could hold him.
If Jim ever wavered in his loyalty to me, it must have been the day I tied him up: he must have been very near hating me then. I had caught him as he was leaving the waggons and still sober; brought him back and told him to sit under his own waggon where I would tie him up like a dog. I took a piece of sail twine, tied it to one wrist, and, fastening the other end to the waggon-wheel, left him.
A kaffir’s face becomes, when he wishes it, quite inscrutable—as expressionless as a blank wall. But there are exceptions to every rule; and Jim’s stoicism was not equal to this occasion. The look of unspeakable disgust and humiliation on his face was more than I could bear with comfort; and after half an hour or so in the pillory I released him. He did not say a word, but, heedless of the hot sun, rolled himself in his blankets and, sleeping or not, never moved for the rest of the day.