But I have dwelt also, too long, with those northern people referred to who burrow in the earth, and with those southerners, not half long enough, who inhabit the trees. Not to be forgotten are our quarters before Plevna, in the compound of a Bulgar farm-house. The floor of its single room lay perhaps two feet beneath the soil, and one entered by a steep incline—that is to say, the inhabitants entered. The ends of the roof descended just so low as to give room for a foot-square window at the level of the earth; but on the incline mentioned, it rose. One of my comrades in this hostelry was poor MacGahan, who lay on his back and sang the whole day through when at home. He had laid some hay upon the “stoop” beside the entrance, and from amongst it his bright eyes watched and his voice resounded. I lived in a waggon. One day the gudewife interviewed my dragoman. She expressed her belief that it was MacGahan’s songs that brought the rain, which, indeed, was perennial. She clung to her point with vehemence. Her husband arrived, and so did some Cossacks. They listened with great interest for a while, understanding not a word, and then, with a happy impulse, hustled the Bulgar head first into his den. The motive of this proceeding lay beyond our comprehension, and theirs also, no doubt; but the Cossack is an irresponsible being. When we laughed they roared, crinkling their jolly, ugly faces until the eyes vanished altogether. I gave them a drink, but not a many-bladed knife, which was lost to human sight in that hour.
The dirtiest experience to which mankind may be subjected is a campaign; but when Russ meets Turk on Bulgarian fields you have a conjuncture of men and circumstances not to be realised elsewhere. The country was sodden at that time, the camps mid-leg deep in puddled clay. General Zortoff, who had the command, occupied a hut much like ours, a couple of hundred yards away; but we always mounted to pay a call, for the space round head-quarters was an actual bog. Officers waiting on the general sat perched upon fences round his yard, in a manner very drolly miserable. The staff had their office in a cowshed which had not been cleaned for years.
A month in a Dyak house is another pleasing recollection. For that space of time, barring nights camped out, my quarters lay besides the council fire. A hoop of human heads hung above it, within arm’s length of my own. Ugly were they as valued—precious ugly, one might say with literal truth—but the ghosts never visited my dreams. All the inhabitants of a Dyak village dwell under one roof, more than a thousand feet in length sometimes. The whole building stands twenty to sixty feet in air on massive posts. Every family has its single apartment side by side, the chief’s in the middle, and every door opens on a clear, sheltered space running from end to end, which we call the inner verandah, for there is a second beyond the eave. Opposite the chief’s door lie the big stones of the council hearth, the heads, belonging to the clan, strung on hoops, and details of common property. That month spent with savages, living their life, noting the thousand small events of every day, about which the most thoughtful of men would hardly think of asking speculative questions—the experience of that time taught me much that has been useful since: for the naked barbarian and the æsthetic philosopher are one. He who knows by practice the instincts of human nature understands a thousand mysteries inscrutable to one who has only its acquired customs to guide him.
Pleasant was the teaching. Fog alone was visible from the top of the ladder when the house began to stir—a sea of mist from which arose, with no trunks perceptible, the crowns of fruit trees and feathered crests of palms. First the married men turned out, and then the bachelors appeared from their separate quarter; shivering under his bark blanket, each cut a plug of betel and chewed it. Then graceful girls came out with long shovel baskets, some leisurely and composed, others bustling; these had not winnowed the paddy over night, and certain of the youths knew why. After a while the housewife opened her door, and in that defiant voice which belongs to hard-working mothers everywhere, summoned her family to breakfast. When they reappeared the fog was lifting, the sky dappled like an opal. Cheered by the growing warmth men moved briskly, arranging their tools and arms and gear. The young women and maidens followed, a pleasing bevy, with loads strapped to their backs, and all the villagers descended to the lower earth.
Only the chief and his old councillors remained—sitting over their eternal fire, chewing their eternal betel—the grandames, and the sick. Towards sunset the laboring folk returned, and the males sat to chew and gossip, but the girls had still their hardest work to do. Presently all the house resounded with the thud of pestles, and the air was filled with husks from the pounded rice. A silence of interest and hunger followed whilst the meal was cooking, and then the pleasure of the day began. For the elders it was only talk, always the same, as far as I could gather, of bad times and good times, and the prospect of the year; seldom personal, and never gossiping, at the chief’s fire, where all heads of families assembled. No one paid attention to the youth or to the maidens, so soon as their household duties were complete. By this time darkness had quite fallen, and there was no light excepting the low fires. Shoulders glossy as brown silk were faintly luminous in the twilight, as we looked down the house; from time to time a fire shot out, revealing the seated group around, lively enough, but subdued. Shadows stalked from hearth to hearth, tinkling and sparkling in brazen finery, and vanished with the gloom;—then the whispered chatter of girls, the smothered merriment, became more loud, with expostulations and mirthful appeals for help. A very pleasant scene; but I loved also to awake at midnight, and observe that different picture. The councillors, taking no exercise, never turned in; all the night through they maundered, and dozed, and coughed, and chewed betel. Above them the teeth of the weazened “heads” glimmered through the smoke. A labyrinth of posts and beams was faintly outlined in their rear. Now and again a young form passed stealthily, for in the hours of darkness courtship is seriously pursued. Beneath the cave I caught a glimpse of azure sky, and palm fronds gleaming in the moonlight. Of all the odd quarters I have known this is still the dearest to memory.
Once upon a time I lost myself in the veldt, somewhere by the Vaal river. Leaving Pniel in a “spider cart,” with a mulatto groom, I inspected the wet-diggings as far as Gong-Gong, and then got off the track. They told me that to go wrong would be impossible, with an Africander to steer my course, but I contrived to do it. Some philosophers would have you think that every savage has an instinctive mastery of woodcraft, but experience leads me to think that fools are almost as common in Barbarie as in Christendom. We lost ourselves, and wandered two days, heading direct for the Atlantic—and for nothing else in particular, besides the Namaqualand desert. Settlements are very few in that veldt, and the only one we came across was Jantje’s kraal on the second evening;—Jantje has since rebelled, and is now an outlaw, I believe. It had some forty huts on the top of a mound, encompassed by raging brooks;—for the sky had been little better than a sieve since we started. There was no sign of life, but a swelling roar of voices directed me to a wooden church, which I entered. All the population were there, and the vehemence of their devotions was deafening. A fat man hurried up, not ceasing to howl with the rest—his mouth opened from ear to ear and nose to chin. He took my arm, and led me out like a stray dog, whilst the congregation bellowed and stared without a pause. So many white lips—and teeth—fixed on me, in a gathering darkness that obscured the black faces, had an effect indescribably gruesome and absurd.
Outside the church this personage turned to resume his place, singing all the time as loud as he could bawl. My groom coming up arrested certain demands of explanation, which began to take a serious form, but no help could be got from Jantje’s people. We annexed an empty hut and camped there supperless, wet through. My first experience of tompans was made that night. This curious insect dwells in deserted Kaffir buildings and nowhere else, I believe. He is armed after the best and newest suggestions of science for naval equipment—his vital parts and locomotive machinery protected by the cuirass, his artillery, of great weight and superior rifling, on the Moncrieff system, swift to attack and agile to retreat. You cannot crush him with any weapon less ponderous than a hammer; to ignore a beast as large and as flat as a threepenny bit is impossible, and moral influence seems to be quite ineffective. To sing hymns and cultivate tompans was the only visible employment of Jantje’s kraal. I cannot affect to regret that its inhabitants have been scattered to the winds. Wherever they have fled they have found an opportunity to study better manners.
But I was going to recall the odd quarters at Jacobsdaal which brought this adventure to a fitting close. We had no treaty of extradition with the Free State at that time—I do not know that we have one now. All sorts of criminals took refuge at Jacobsdaal, a tiny but prosperous settlement lying just across the frontier. During my absence a gust of indignation had swept over the Diamond Fields, and all the guilty, the suspected, and the alarmed had fled. The landlady of the best “Accommodation House” declared to me, almost with tears, that her dwelling, hitherto inveterate in virtue, was become a rendezvous of malefactors. She advised me to try the other shop for once, since even thieves would not go there by choice—naturally. I did so, and found the guests sitting down. In the place of honor was a canteen man, badly wanted by the New Rush police. I also recognized an acquaintance accused of cheating at cards in the “Pig and Whistle;” another who had been lately described to the magistrate as “tremendous delirious;” an American gentleman whom the police had vainly besought to render an account to his partners. One of these latter, in attendance on his fugitive associate, identified for me a man charged with murder, and two common thieves. The conversation was most polite. The chairman’s suasive tones in proposing a “leetle mutton” were as good as testimony to character. He had a trick of cocking the old smoking-cap upon his head before every observation, as if to point it with knowingness. The extreme propriety with which he guided the conversation so overawed the thieves that they were too hoarse to talk. My poor “tremendous” friend yielded to the same wholesome influence, and addressed everyone in the third person as “the honorable gentleman on my right,” or left, or opposite. As for the manslaughterer, he showed warm philanthropy, arguing with vehemence that black people have as good rights as white, and better in their own country. Circumstances made this topic embarrassing to the chairman. He cocked his smoking-cap from side to side, imploring everyone to take some more of everything. After supper he made a little speech, ending with a toast—“Home, lads, mothers and dads.” The company drank it with deep emotion.—Belgravia.