“‘By God,’ he says, coming up to me, and extending the right hand of fellowship, ‘you ought to be English, Zigler!’
“It’s no good getting mad at a compliment like that. The English all do it. They’re a crazy breed. When they don’t know you they freeze up tighter’n the St. Lawrence. When they do, they go out like an ice-jam in April. Up till we prisoners left—four days—my Captain Mankeltow told me pretty much all about himself there was; his mother and sisters, and his bad brother that was a trooper in some Colonial corps, and how his father didn’t get on with him, and—well, everything, as I’ve said. They’re undomesticated, the British, compared with us. They talk about their own family affairs as if they belonged to someone else. ’Taint as if they hadn’t any shame, but it sounds like it. I guess they talk out loud what we think, and we talk out loud what they think.
“I liked my Captain Mankeltow. I liked him as well as any man I’d ever struck. He was white. He gave me his silver drinking-flask, and I gave him the formula of my Laughtite. That’s a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in his vest-pocket, on the lowest count, if he has the knowledge to use it. No, I didn’t tell him the money-value. He was English. He’d send his valet to find out.
“Well, me and Adrian and a crowd of dam Dutchmen was sent down the road to Cape Town in first-class carriages under escort. (What did I think of your enlisted men? They are largely different from ours, Sir: very largely.) As I was saying, we slid down south, with Adrian looking out of the car-window and crying. Dutchmen cry mighty easy for a breed that fights as they do; but I never understood how a Dutchman could curse till we crossed into the Orange Free State Colony, and he lifted up his hand and cursed Steyn for a solid ten minutes. Then we got into the Colony, and the rebs—ministers mostly and schoolmasters—came round the cars with fruit and sympathy and texts. Van Zyl talked to ’em in Dutch, and one man, a big red-bearded minister, at Beaufort West, I remember, he jest wilted on the platform.
“‘Keep your prayers for yourself,’ says Van Zyl, throwing back a bunch of grapes. ‘You’ll need ’em, and you’ll need the fruit too, when the war comes down here. You done it,’ he says. ‘You and your picayune Church that’s deader than Cronje’s dead horses! What sort of a God have you been unloading on us, you black aas vogels? The British came, and we beat ’em,’ he says, ‘and you sat still and prayed. The British beat us, and you sat still,’ he says. ‘You told us to hang on, and we hung on, and our farms was burned, and you sat still—you and your God. See here,’ he says, ‘I shot my Bible full of bullets after Bloemfontein went, and you and God didn’t say anything. Take it and pray over it before we Federals help the British to knock hell out of you rebels.’
“Then I hauled him back into the car. I judged he’d had a fit. But life’s curious—and sudden—and mixed. I hadn’t any more use for a reb than Van Zyl, and I knew something of the lies they’d fed us up with from the Colony for a year and more. I told the minister to pull his freight out of that, and went on with my lunch, when another man come along and shook hands with Van Zyl. He’d known him at close range in the Kimberley seige and before. Van Zyl was well seen by his neighbours, I judge. As soon as this other man opened his mouth I said, ‘You’re Kentucky, ain’t you?’ ‘I am,’ he says; ‘and what may you be?’ I told him right off, for I was pleased to hear good United States in any man’s mouth; but he whipped his hands behind him and said, ‘I’m not knowing any man that fights for a Tammany Dutchman. But I presoom you’ve been well paid, you dam gun-runnin’ Yank.’
“Well, Sir, I wasn’t looking for that, and it near knocked me over, while old man Van Zyl started in to explain.
“‘Don’t you waste your breath, Mister Van Zyl,’ the man says. ‘I know this breed. The South’s full of ’em.’ Then he whirls round on me and says, ‘Look at here, you Yank. A little thing like a King’s neither here nor there, but what you’ve done,’ he says, ‘is to go back on the White Man in six places at once—two hemispheres and four continents—America, England, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Don’t open your head,’ he says. ‘You know well if you’d been caught at this game in our country you’d have been jiggling in the bight of a lariat before you could reach for your naturalisation papers. Go on and prosper,’ he says, ‘and you’ll fetch up by fighting for niggers, as the North did.’ And he threw me half-a-crown—English money.
“Sir, I do not regard the proposition in that light, but I guess I must have been somewhat shook by the explosion. They told me at Cape Town one rib was driven in on to my lungs. I am not adducing this as an excuse, but the cold God’s truth of the matter is—the money on the floor did it…. I give up and cried. Put my head down and cried.
“I dream about this still sometimes. He didn’t know the circumstances, but I dream about it. And it’s Hell!