The man who wrote for the papers smiled.
“I know,” he said with kindling eye—“I know. It was just such a case you told us of at Churchill’s Camp the other night. A man of the best calibre and training goes wild and marries two—mark you, two!—Kaffir women, and becomes a Swazie chief, and then the drama of the—”
“Drama be damned!” growled Barberton. “It was one case out of twenty of the same sort.”
Barberton was nervously apprehensive of ridicule, and hated to be traded and walked out for effects.
“I was up on the Transvaal-Swazie border in ’86,” said the millionaire. “I remember you told me something of them then. It was a warm corner, Swazieland, then—about the warmest in South Africa, I should think. Eh?”
“You’re right. It was. But,” said Barberton, turning to the correspondent, “you were talking of men going amok through playing white nigger. Well, I can tell you this, that two of my best friends have done that same trick, and I’d stake my head that better men or more thorough gentlemen never trod in shoe-leather, for all their Kaffir ways.”
“Do you mean to say,” asked the millionaire, “that you have known men settle down among natives, living among them as one of themselves, and still retain the manners, customs, instincts, habits of mind and body, even to the ambitions, of a white man?”
“No—well, I can’t quite say that. Their ambitions, as far as you could gauge them, were a Kaffir’s; that is, they aspired to own cattle, and to hunt successfully, but—And yet I don’t know that it is right to say that even, because in almost every case these men get the ‘hanker’ for white life again sooner or later. The Kaffir ambition may be a temporary one, or it may be that the return to white ways is the passing mania. Who knows, any way? From my own experience of them, I can say that the return to their own colour almost invariably means their doom and ruin. I don’t know why, but I’ve noticed it, and it seems like—like a sort of judgment, if you believe in those things.”
“And you know,” he said, after taking a few pulls at the pipe again, “there’s a sense of justice in that, too. Civilisation, scorned and flouted, being the instrument of its own revenge! If one could vest the abstract with personal feelings, what an ample revenge would be hers at the sight of the renegade—sick-hearted, weary, and shamefaced—coming back to the ways of his youth and race, and succumbing to some one part of that which he had despised and rejected in toto!”
Barberton generally became philosophic and reminiscent on these fine nights. Someone would make a remark of pretty general application, and he would sit up and wag his old head a few times in silence; then, from force of habit, examine his pipe and knock it out on the heel of his boot, and then out would lounge some reminiscence in illustration of his philosophy.