"I have never," he declared, breathlessly, "I have never seen so many beautiful women in one place at the same time! I'd forgotten that there were so many white people in the world."
"If I stay on board this ship another minute I shall go home," said Her Majesty's consul, firmly. "You will have to hold me. It's coming over me—I feel it coming. I shall never have the strength to go back." He appealed to the sympathetic lieutenant. "Let's desert together," he begged.
One-half of the Street Cleaning Department of Mozambique.
In the swamps of the East Coast the white exiles lay aside the cloaks and masks of crowded cities. They do not try to conceal their feelings, their vices, or their longings. They talk to the first white stranger they meet of things which in the great cities a man conceals even from his room-mate, and men they would not care to know, and whom they would never meet in the fixed social pathways of civilization, they take to their hearts as friends. They are too few to be particular, they have no choice, and they ask no questions. It is enough that the white man, like themselves, is condemned to exile. They do not try to find solace in the thought that they are the "foretrekkers" of civilization, or take credit to themselves because they are the path-finders and the pioneers who bear the heat and burden of the day. They are sorry for themselves, because they know, more keenly than any outsider can know, how good is the life they have given up, and how hard is the one they follow, but they do not ask anyone else to be sorry. They would be very much surprised if they thought you saw in their struggle against native and Portuguese barbarism, fever, and savage tribes, a life of great good and value, full of self-renunciation, heroism, and self-sacrifice.
On the day they boarded the Kanzlar the pains of nostalgia were sweeping over the respectable members of Chinde society like waves of nausea, and tearing them. With a grim appreciation of their own condition, they smiled mockingly at the ladies on the quarter-deck, as you have seen prisoners grin through the bars; they were even boisterous and gay, but their gayety was that of children at recess, who know that when the bell rings they are going back to the desk.
A little English boy ran through the smoking-room, and they fell upon him, and quarrelled for the privilege of holding him on their knees. He was a shy, coquettish little English boy, and the boisterous, noisy men did not appeal to him. To them he meant home and family and the old nursery, papered with colored pictures from the Christmas Graphic. His stout, bare legs and tangled curls and sailor's hat, with "H.M.S. Mars" across it, meant all that was clean and sweet-smelling in their past lives.
"I'll arrest you for a deserter," said the lieutenant of the gunboat. "I'll make the consul send you back to the Mars." He held the boy on his knee fearfully, handling him as though he were some delicate and precious treasure that might break if he dropped it.
The agent of the Oceanic Development Company, Limited, whose business in life is to drive savage Angonis out of the jungle, where he hopes in time to see the busy haunts of trade, begged for the boy with eloquent pleading.