The process is that you first place in each room four receptacles for the ingredients, which when mixed instantly kill everything near—men, beasts, or insects. You have to clear out of the house all food of every kind, all plates, dishes, saucepans, and jugs—in fact, the entire contents of the kitchen; also anything in the way of furniture, clothes, ornaments, pictures, etc., that you don't want to have bleached out of recognition. The Agricultural Journal blithely informs you that the process "causes no inconvenience of any kind," as all you "need remove from the house (to a safe distance) are——" and then follow the above items, which we soon discovered to mean that the entire house had to be dismantled and every stick in it hauled out on to the veldt. You naturally don't want anything you have to be bleached to a cinder, so out it all has to come. The lifting, the shouting, the dragging, and the running to and fro have lasted till now—midnight. Being a fine night, and the barometer high, we decided to get everything out so that at daylight the fumigation could be started, after which everyone has to rush helter-skelter through the doors, shut them, lock them, and paste a notice on them to say whoever goes inside is a dead man. (The Transvaal law compels this.) Then you sit all day on the veldt upon your possessions till eight hours have passed, after which the thing is done, and you start to fix up your house again the same as when you first came into it.
"WE DECIDED TO GET EVERYTHING OUT."
There is a full moon, and by it we can see all our possessions strewed round Simplicity Hall for about half a square mile. Tall cupboards tower towards the stars, the dining-room table has all the chairs and Mr. H——'s packing-case piled on to it, and dressing-tables stand about, hung with bits of everyone's wardrobe, a pyjama suit floating in the breeze here, a lady's nightdress there. In the centre of the circus, in an open ring, sits Jaikeran on the kitchen range (which likewise had to be removed, said the Agricultural Journal, "unless you wished to have your oven permeated with prussic acid," the editor evidently thinking it possible that such might be our wish). In this fashion does our domestic prepare, in some sort of style, an evening meal for us on a "Puffing Billy" stove set on the grass.
Everybody is in a temper, and once more the Simple Life is subjected to curses low and deep, as we all sit balancing ourselves on odd pieces of furniture, eating by the light of tallow candles which eternally go out.
We should have done the horrid thing at night and let it work while we all slept in the tents, but the chemist warned us not to dream of attempting it in anything like dusk or darkness. Each person has to be told off to stand ready in one room with their allowance of vitriol, and the prussic acid safely fastened up in a paper bag, tied at the mouth with a long piece of string, so that you can drop it into the vitriol and get away before the fumes suffocate you; which happens in one and a half seconds exactly.
Should you stumble in the dark over something, nothing can save you, though they tell the rescuers how to get on their hands and knees with their heads in a wet blanket, and crawl close to the floor, in the event of a friend being caught, and a cheerful illustration of four corpses in a row is appended. Six-and-eightpence is a very highly-strung man, and is already in a state of nervousness about the whole thing, bordering on hydrophobia or suicidal mania. Anyhow, he has been talking all the evening in a very despondent way, bequeathing things (such as the old Ratner safe in his office, his "Van Dam on Divorce," his book of trout flies, his kaross, etc.) to one or the other of us, "just in case anything happens," he says. And we are quite certain that were we to attempt to do this thing at night something would happen for certain. Six-and-eightpence would lose his head, and either lock himself or someone else into one of the rooms after the stuff had been mixed, forgetting which side of the door he was on, or something like that. Or the MacPhairson would be too long and too careful over his mixing and fall senseless; and then, however much we should like to, how could we leave him to die? One of us would have to get into a wet blanket (first pumping the water out of the well half a mile away, by the by) and go to his rescue, and, of course, be overpowered in turn. Someone else would then have to go to them, and soon it would be like the ten little nigger-boys—"And then there were none."
So, talking it over—and the pasting-up of the house having taken us till long after dark—we decided to wait until the friendly daylight.
We are now retiring to rest, and all bade each other "Good night" much as shipwrecked castaways would do on an open raft in mid-ocean, with sharks waiting for them, and only someone's blanket and each other left to eat. I'm not at all sure that I wouldn't rather put up with the "moss—quitoes" than all this.
February 29th.—I was aroused at daylight on the 21st by Veronica saying, in sepulchral tones, "The day has arrived, E——. Get up."