By Veldt and Kopje

by W. C. Scully

A Case for Psychical Research.

One

“We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”

Once upon a time it was my hap to dwell in a certain town in the Eastern Province of Cape Colony, which will not be recognised under the name of Hilston. With a population of about a thousand Europeans, it bore a strong resemblance to several other communities in the same province. It contained the usual disproportionate number of churches and liquor-shops, the usual utter absence of anything like Christianity as a rule of life—or, in fact, as anything but a mere form—the usual number of persons whose only occupation appeared to be that of killing time, and the usual intellectual dry-rot and deadly dulness. The morning market was the great rendezvous for the gossips. Here, around the butter and vegetable-laden tables would the neighbouring farmers and their town cronies foregather every week-day morning; here they would swop mild and superannuated jokes, rank tobacco, scandalous tales, and insinuations more or less damaging to their neighbours’ characters.

Being engaged upon special duty, and living in daily expectation of having to move on to new official pastures, I had taken up my abode at a small hotel near the outskirts, my choice of a sojourning place being determined by the comparative nocturnal quiet of the vicinity. Here I dwelt in moderate comfort tempered by accidents which it is needless to specify.

By far the most interesting feature of Hilston, to me at least, was old Isaac, the septuagenarian billiard-marker at the hotel where I lodged and boarded. Isaac (it may be premised that he had, once upon a time, possessed a surname, although all trace of it was lost) had a phenomenally bad temper and an exceedingly bitter tongue. Being badly hump-backed, he was only about three feet nine in height. Twenty-eight years previously he had drifted as a tramp to Hilston, whence no one knew, and had been employed as a stable-hand by the then proprietor of the hotel. Eight years after this the establishment changed hands, and Isaac was taken over with the other fixtures. The new proprietor, a young man with a little capital at his command, built a billiard-room and imported a brand new and first-class table. Isaac, to his great satisfaction, was appointed marker, and he at once experienced what was probably the one great passion of his life, for he fell violently in love with his charge. It was said that he had been more than once watched through the window, when alone in the room, rubbing his cheek softly over the new, silky, green cloth, and that he was wont to stand for an hour at a time, when no players were about, gently passing his hand over the sides and fondling the cushions.

When I made the acquaintance of the table and its custodian, they looked equally the worse for wear. The original cloth was still doing duty, but was patched and darned in nearly a dozen places. In spite of the shabby attire, however, Isaac still loved his mistress with ardour and constancy. The proprietor informed me confidentially that he would long since have invested in a new cloth and cushions but for the strenuous way in which the old man opposed any suggestion towards a change. He still slept, as he had done for twenty years, rolled up in an old rug on one of the lumpy benches provided for the use of spectators, and no matter how late the habitual loafers, who practically lived in the room, or the gilded youth of the town, who now and then gambled mildly over the clicking ivories, kept up their threepenny black pool, he carefully dusted down his darling, and covered her with a drab holland cloth before retiring to rest on his narrow and uneven couch.

In South African towns of the Hilston class there are neither clubs, theatres nor music-halls. The billiard-room is, therefore, the only place of general resort for relaxation, and in it you will meet the local male inhabitant, or the greater part of him, in his most interesting—that is to say in his most natural—mood. Here he is relaxed and unconstrained; here he joins with his fellows in a brotherhood which, although temporary, is often renewed; here the tobacco-smoke cloud unites those who create it in a common humanity, and even seems to inspire those who breathe it with a common human soul. Many of the associations of the billiard-room are, no doubt, unedifying; but so long as man remains a gregarious animal, so long will he seek out some spot in which to meet his fellows without restraint. In my individual case the billiard-room was the only place in the hotel suitable for smoking in; consequently I spent a great deal of time in it, especially in the evenings.

In the very early stage of our acquaintanceship I won old Isaac’s heart by remonstrating with a semi-intoxicated player for allowing burning tobacco to fall from his pipe upon the cloth. Soon after I got an inkling of the old man’s affection for his charge I began, for the sake of amusement, to play up to it; then the evident genuineness of the feeling gained my involuntary respect, and I could not avoid being struck by the pathos of the situation.

As our acquaintance grew, Isaac became more and more confidential, and I was astonished at the critical faculty displayed in his caustic comments upon the different frequenters of the billiard-room. He had the faculty of ticking people off in a terse phrase of epigrammatic force and inevitable application. Being more or less of a butt for cheap witticisms on the part of those among whom his daily life was thrown, Isaac cordially disliked nine people out of every ten whom he knew. One of the favourite diversions of the gilded youth was to abuse the table in the old marker’s hearing, and to compare its capabilities unfavourably with those of the rival hotel up the street. This Isaac would stand for a time, but when the limit of endurance had been reached, he would break into a withering storm of profane invective such as I have never heard equalled. His power of venting ingenious and fantastic scurrility on these occasions might have rivalled that of Thersites, the “deformed and scurrilous Grecian.”