Chapter Twelve.
The Red Signal – Or the White?
“Why – it is. It’s old Qubani,” said Driffield.
“And who might old ‘Click’-ubani be?” asked Clare.
“He’s a thundering big Matabele witch-doctor. Fancy the old boy rolling up to see the fun. Wonder they let him in.”
“It was thanks to you, Driffield,” said a man who was within earshot. “He was asking for you. Told them at the gate that you and Lamont had invited him to come.”
“Then he told a whacking big lie, at any rate as far as I am concerned. Well, I suppose I must go and talk to him, and incidentally stand him something. In my line it’s everything to be well in with influential natives.”
“Can’t you bring him here, Mr Driffield?” asked Clare. “I’d like to talk to a Matabele chief – didn’t you say he was a chief?”
“No; a witch-doctor, who, in his way, is often just as big a pot as a chief – sometimes a bigger. You’d better come over with me and talk to him, Miss Vidal; then, when you’ve had enough of him, you can go away, whereas if I bring him here he may stick on for ever.”
Old Qubani, who was squatting against the enclosure talking to a roughish-looking white man, rose to his feet as he saw Driffield, and with hand uplifted poured forth lavish sibongo. Then he turned to Clare.
“Nkosazana! Uhle! Amehlo kwezulu! Wou! Sipazi-pazi!”
“What does he say?” she asked.
“He hails you as a princess, says that you are beautiful, and have eyes like the heavens – and that you are dazzling. That’s why he put his hand over his eyes and looked down.”
“Silly old man; he’s quite poetical,” she said, looking pleased all the same.
“Indhlovukazi!”
“Now he’s calling you a female elephant.”
“Oh, the horrid old wretch. That is a come down, Mr Driffield.”
“Yes, it sounds so, but it’s a big word of sibongo, or praise, with them.”
“Oh well, then I must forgive him.”
“Intandokazi!”
“What’s that?” said Clare, but Driffield had cut short the old man’s rigmarole and was talking to him about something else. He did not care to tell her that she was being hailed as his – Driffield’s – principal – or rather best-loved – wife. Two white men, standing near, and who understood, turned away with a suppressed splutter.
There was the usual request for tobacco, and then, Qubani glancing meaningly in the direction of the bar tent, remarked that he had travelled far, and that the white man made better tywala than the Amandabeli, as, indeed, what could not the white men do.
“A bottle of Bass won’t hurt him,” declared Driffield, sending across for it.
“Why does he wear that great thick cap?” said Clare. “He’d look much better without it.”
“This?” said the old man, putting his hand to the cap of red knitted worsted, surmounted by a tuft, which adorned his head – as the remark was translated to him. “Whau! I am old and the nights are not warm.”
“Why, he’s got on two,” said Clare, as the movement, slightly displacing the red cap, showed another underneath made of like material but white. “Goodness! I wonder his head doesn’t split.”
“Native heads don’t split in a hurry, Miss Vidal,” said Orwell, the Resident Magistrate, who had joined them in time to catch the remark.
“I don’t believe I ought to speak to you, Mr Orwell – at any rate not just yet. You had no business to win that tent-pegging. I had backed Mr Lamont.”
The Magistrate laughed.
“Let me tell you, Miss Vidal, that you had backed the right man then. In fact it’s inconceivable to me how he missed that last time, unless the sense of his awful responsibility made him nervous. It would have made me so.”
Again, many a true word uttered in jest. The speaker little knew that he had stated what was literally and exactly the case.
“Nonsense. I wonder where Mr Lamont has got to. He hasn’t been near me since.”
“That I can quite believe. He’s afraid. I know I should be.”
“Nonsense again, Mr Orwell.” And talking about other things they turned away, quite forgetting the old witch-doctor. There was one, however, who was not forgetting him – no, not by any means.
The while Jim Steele, the latest rejected of Clare, was very drunk in the bar tent. When we say very drunk we don’t mean to convey the idea that he was incapable, or even unsteady on his pins to any appreciable extent – but just nasty, quarrelsome, fighting drunk; and as he was a big, powerful fellow, most of those standing about were rather civil to him. Now Jim Steele was at bottom a good fellow rather than otherwise, but his rejection by Clare Vidal he had taken to heart. He had also taken to drink.
He had noticed Clare and Lamont together that day, and had more than once scowled savagely at the pair. Moreover, he had heard that Clare had backed Lamont – and had made others do so – in the tent-pegging, and now he was bursting with rage and jealousy. It follows therefore that this was an unfortunate moment for the object of his hatred to enter the tent, and call for a whisky-and-soda. Upon him he wheeled round.
“You can’t ride a damn!” he shouted.
“I never tried. I prefer to ride a horse,” said Lamont, setting down his glass.
“But you can’t,” jeered Steele. Then roused to the highest pitch of fury by the other’s coolness, he bellowed: “Look here. Can you fight, eh? Can you? Because if so, come on.”
Something akin to intense dismay came into Lamont’s mind at this development. That this drunken, aggressive idiot should have it in his power to dig not only his own grave – that would have been a good riddance – but all their graves, was a new and startling development in a situation that was already sufficiently complicated. For apart from his horror and repulsion at being perforce a party to a drunken brawl in the bar tent – how was he going to impress Qubani, at the crucial moment, with a bunged-up eye, perchance, or a bleeding nose. He would only look ridiculous, not in the least impressive, and it was of vital importance he should look impressive.
“Yes, I can,” he answered shortly, “but I’m not going to – now.”
A murmur of disgust arose from among some of the bystanders. Lamont had funked again.
“Then you’re a blanked coward,” yelled Steele, and the murmurs deepened. And yet – and yet – there was a look in Lamont’s dark face which made some of them pause, for it was not exactly the look of one who was afraid, rather was it that of a man who was trying to restrain himself.
“I’m not going to now,” he said shortly, “but I’ll accommodate you where and when you like, after the gymkhana’s over. We can’t start bruising now, with a lot of ladies on the scene. Now, can we?”
The bystanders, thus appealed to, saw the sense of this. Besides, they were not going to be done out of their fun this time. It was only fun adjourned.
“No, no. That’s quite right and reasonable. Jim, you can’t kick up a row here now. Take it out of him afterwards,” were some of the cries that arose.
“He won’t be there. He’ll scoot.”
“Oh no, I won’t,” answered Lamont. “I’ll be there,” – “if any of us are,” he added to himself grimly.
He finished his liquor and went outside. There was a lull in the proceedings, and people were moving about and talking, pending the distribution of the prizes.
“Greeting, Qubani. That is good. Last time we talked was ‘kwa Zwabeka.’”
“Ou! Lamonti is my father,” answered the old witch-doctor. Then, having fired off a long string of sibongo, he concluded that the sun was very hot, and it was long since he had drunk anything.
“That shall be presently when these are gone,” said Lamont. “But first – walk round with me, and I will show you where the horses race. It is good to see the chief of all izanusi again.”
The old ruffian complied, nothing loth. He was thinking that the more exuberant his friendliness the more completely would he lull all suspicion among these fools of whites. He professed himself profoundly interested in everything explained to him.
“I saw you ride, Lamonti,” he said. “Whau! but you did pick up the little bits of wood with the long spear. That was great – great. But the other Inkosi was greater.”
“Yes, the other was greater, Qubani, but what made me miss that stroke was joy at seeing my father, the greatest of all izanusi in our midst.”
“Whau!”
“Mr Lamont, do come and help us with the prizes. They balloted for who should distribute them, and Lucy was chosen. Do come and stand by us and help. They are going to begin now.”
“I’m most awfully sorry, Miss Vidal, but I can’t just now.”
“You won’t?” said Clare curtly, for she was not accustomed to be refused.
“I can’t,” he repeated. “Do believe I have a good reason – and don’t direct any attention to me just now. Believe me, a great deal hangs upon it.”
“Very well,” she said, and left him, marvelling. It must be as he had said – still that he should refuse to do something for her and prefer to talk to this squalid old savage instead – why, it was incomprehensible.
“What is covered up on that waggon, Nkose!” said the witch-doctor, pointing to a waggon which stood just inside the fence. Its position, perhaps, directly facing the Ehlatini ridge, suggested an inspiration to Lamont. He answered —
“Izikwa-kwa.” (Maxim guns.)
“’M – ’m! Izikwa-kwa?” hummed the other, wholly unable to suppress a considerable start of surprise. Then, recovering himself, he grinned, in bland incredulity.
“Inkosi is joking,” he said. “There is no war.”
“Nevertheless those are izikwa-kwa, loaded and ready to pour forth a storm of bullets for the rest of the day;” and the speaker devoutly prayed that the bar-keeper might not send his boy to get out another supply of soda-water bottles from beneath the sail and thus expose the fraud.
“Come. We will go and see them receive the rewards, those who have won them. But first I would have something to remember the chief of izanusi by. So sell me that red cap which is on thy head, Qubani,” producing some silver.
“Now nay, my father, now nay, for the nights are cold and this red cap is warm – ah! ah! warm. See, here is a fine horn snuff-box, be content with that instead, as a gift.”
“Here I hold the lives of twelve men – six on each side,” answered Lamont, showing him the butt of a revolver, in one of his side pockets. “If I receive not that red cap this instant, the first life it shall spill will be that of the chief of all izanusi.”
Qubani grunted, then his hand went slowly to his head. It was a tense, a nerve-racking moment. Would this savage, defying death, hurl the blood-red symbol high in the air, or —
The two were alone together now, the whole assembly having gathered round the prize tent. Lamont had drawn a revolver.
“Move not, save to hand me that cap,” he said.
For a moment the savage hesitated. But the ring of steel pointing straight at his chest, perhaps the awful and fell look on this man’s face, from which every drop of blood had vanished, and whose eyes were glittering like those of a wild beast, decided him. His hand came slowly down from his head, and the red cap was in Lamont’s left hand.
Yes, it was a tense moment, and in the excitement of it Lamont had all he could do to keep his nerves steady. With a mind characteristically attuned to trifles at such a moment he found his attention partly shared by such. Apart from the crowd a very pretty girl was rating a man, in voluble English with a foreign accent, apparently for having paid too much attention elsewhere during the day. He heard Jim Steele snarling and cursing in the bar tent, and idly wondered if his language would reach ears for which it was not fit. He felt an interest in Orwell’s dog, running about in search of its master – in short, a dozen other trivialities raced through his brain. Then a loud cheer broke the spell. The first prize had been distributed.
“This is not the unarmed gathering you would think, Qubani,” he said, speaking in quick low tones. “Each man – and there are nearly two hundred of them – has his weapons all ready, and would have them in his hand in far less time than it would take you to run – say from here to Ehlatini.”
“Whou!” ejaculated the witch-doctor, bringing his hand to his mouth.
“Moreover, all round Gandela there is laid that which would blow a whole impi into the air did such walk over it. The whites know where it is, but it would be very dangerous for strangers.”
“Ha!”
Another cheer went up, as another prize was given away. Incidentally Lamont thought how fortunate he had been in not winning the tent-pegging competition, for he could not have received his prize by deputy, and it was still important to keep a close watch on Qubani.
“And now, O great isanusi,” he went on, “what would be thy fate did those here know what my múti has told me? No quick and easy death, I fear.”
A troubled and anxious look came into the old man’s face.
“You are my father, Lamonti, but your talk is dark – very dark. Ou! Yet though I understand it not, I will do all you wish.”
“That will be wise. Now we will look at them receiving the rewards. Come.”
The prize tent was at the farther end of the enclosure and facing the Ehlatini ridge, towards which the spectators’ backs were, by the position, of necessity turned. But Lamont, as he manoeuvred his prisoner on to the fringe of the crowd, took care that his was not. He noticed, moreover, a thread of smoke arising from the summit of the ridge. Well, there was nothing very extraordinary about that – or – there might have been.
“Throw up thy cap, Qubani,” he said pleasantly, as another cheer broke forth and some hats were thrown in the air. “Throw up thy cap, and rejoice with us. Thy white cap.”
The witch-doctor dared not refuse. With a broad grin, as though he were entering into the fun of the thing, he threw into the air —the white signal.
Again, and again, every time the cheering broke forth, Lamont banteringly bade him throw it higher, promising much tywala when the proceedings were over, till finally many of the spectators turned their attention to him and laughed like anything, cheering him. And one of them remarked that it was worth coming for alone, just to see the old boy flinging up his cap and hooraying like a white man and a brother.
They little knew, those light-hearted ones, that but for one man’s nerve and presence of mind the red signal would have gone up, and then —
Chapter Thirteen.
On Ehlatini
When Clare Vidal awoke on the morning after the race meeting, and her thoughts went back to some of the events and incidents of that sporting and festive gathering, she was fain to own herself sorely puzzled: and those events and incidents, it may as well be said, comprised the extraordinary behaviour of Lamont. He had deliberately snubbed her. He had been especially favoured in being singled out and asked to help her – and, incidentally, her sister – and had, lamely, but decidedly refused. Refused! Why, not a man there present but would have sprung to comply with such a request – such a command – as she laughingly recalled how on their first arrival in the country, by the Umtali route at the close of the war of occupation, she had been christened ‘The Queen of the Laager,’ when a passing scare had rendered it advisable to laager up. Yet this one had refused – refused her! Well, what then? He was simply a morose, unmannerly misogynistic brute! No. She could not look upon it in this light at all.
She had awakened early, and felt that a walk in the cloudless morning air, before the sun rays developed into an oppressive steaminess, would do her good. Gandela at large had not awakened early. There had been a good deal of late carousing among the rougher spirits there gathered together for the occasion, and a good deal of house-to-house visitation, also late, on the part of the more refined. So Gandela at large slept late proportionately.
The Fullertons’ house was on the very outskirts of the township, and she stepped forth straight on to the open veldt. The dew lay, sparkling and silvery, upon the green mimosa fronds, and made a diamond carpet of the parched burnt-up grass upon which her steps left footprints. How beautiful was the early morning in this fresh open land. The call and twitter of birds made strange unknown melody as she passed on her way, leaving the shining zinc roofs of the straggling township, turning her face toward the free open country. There lay the race-course, away on her left, and her face was set toward the dark bushy ridge of Ehlatini.
Two ‘go-away’ birds sped before her, uttering their cat-like call, as, with crest perkily erect and flicking their tails, they danced from frond to frond. How cool the inviting depths of that bush line looked, billowing down the slope of the hill, challenging exploration of their bosky recesses.
Clare was in splendid physical form, and walked with a straight willowy swing from the hips, rejoicing in the sheer physical exercise of her youth and strength. She looked up at the ridge above her, then back at the scattered township behind. To gain the summit would mean a fine view, also taking in the far, unknown stretch of country beyond. She had never wandered this way before, and it would be a novelty and something to expatiate upon to those lazy people whom she had left behind in a state of prolonged slumber. Slumber! and on such a morning.
The morning air blew balmy and warm, straight down from the Zambesi and beyond; straight down from the heart of the great mysterious continent. Later on it would be hot, oppressive. And in the shade of the mimosa, and wild fig, and mahobo-hobo, birds piped and called to each other.
Clare struck into a narrow path, which wound up, a mere cattle-track, through the thickness of the bush. It was delightful this roaming about a wild land alone. Soon, with no great effort or tax upon her powers of wind and limb, she had gained the summit of the ridge.
And then, on the farther side, other ridges went ribbing away in the distance, like billows of dark verdure; but on the right, where they ended, sloping abruptly to the more even ground of the gently undulating country beyond, far away in a film of light and vista, to lose itself in a hazy blue on the skyline nearly a hundred miles distant, stretched a vast mysterious wilderness. Then she sat down beneath the shade of a large overhanging wild fig, to take it all in.
She was used to wildness, and loved it. Reared in one of the wildest tracts of wild Ireland, she had delighted to go forth on solitary rambles, with trout rod and creel, more than ankle deep in soft bog soil, tramping laboriously to her field of action in high mountain lough, where the shrieking gust of a squall every half hour or so drove her to refuge beneath some great rock, what time the trout sulked, only to rise fast and furious when the rain squall had passed, and the raven croaked from the shining wet crags. And this solemn blue vista, stretching away in its vastness, formed a contrast indeed to the stormy glistening grandeur of her former mountain home; here with its hot, sub-tropical steaminess; yet there was that in common between both of them – that both were the wilds.
In the dreaminess of her reverie she started suddenly. The loud neighing of a horse, together with the violent flapping of an empty saddle as the animal shook himself, caused a sudden inroad upon her meditations that produced that effect. There, hitched to a bush, stood a horse, one moreover that she seemed to recognise. Yes, it was the large, high-withered roan that Lamont had ridden when, at her urgent request, he had entered for the tent-pegging competition and – had not won.
In a moment Clare’s meditations, dreamy and otherwise, were scattered to the winds. There was the horse, but – where was its owner? A strange inclination – impulse, rather – to get away, to return before he should discover her presence, came upon her. Yet – why? Why on earth – why?
But whatever the ground for such aspirations they were not to be fulfilled, for at that moment a voice hailed her – an astonished voice.
“Why, Miss Vidal, good morning. Who in the world would have dreamed of meeting you up here?”
“I might say the same, Mr Lamont. I thought I would take a bit of a stroll while all Gandela was sleeping off last night’s orgies. Strange, but I’ve never been up here. I suppose it is because the climb rather froze Lucy off – and I didn’t bother to come alone. Do you know I think this country makes people very lazy.”
“Oh yes. There’s a steaminess about it that gets on to one’s energies somehow. It’ll infect you too when you’ve been out here a little longer.”
“Now don’t talk down to me, Mr Lamont. I feel quite an old pioneer. I came up here during the war, you know.”
“Yes, yes. Just over two years ago.”
“Well, you needn’t be so supercilious. Especially as you don’t seem to have been over-successful yourself this morning.”
“Successful? Oh, I see,” following her glance to the magazine rifle he carried. “No. Game is scarce since the rinderpest, and especially right near Gandela, like this.”
“Look what I found just now, in the bush, before I got to the top here,” she said. “It must be some sort of native ornament.”
She held out to him two white cow-tails, fastened to a kind of bracelet of twisted sinew.
“Yes, it is. Very much of a native ornament.”
The tone was dry, and – she thought – rather curious. She went on —
“I have more than one grievance against you, Mr Lamont. First of all, why didn’t you come in and see us last night? We had quite a number of men dropping in.”
“All the more reason why I shouldn’t, isn’t it? Too much of a crowd, you know.”
“No, I don’t. We can never have too much of a crowd of our friends.”
He laughed – again, she thought, strangely.
“That’s novel doctrine to me, anyway,” he said. “I was always under the impression one could – and very much so. But I don’t think your brother-in-law likes me. Isn’t that good enough excuse?”
“No, it isn’t. Dick doesn’t constitute the whole establishment. But, here is another thing. I own I’ve been dying of curiosity over it ever since. Why was it of so much importance that you should spend the rest of the day with that snuffy old savage? You were sticking to him closer than a brother. In fact you were at each other’s elbow all the time. More than one noticed it.”
“Oh, did they?” and here she noticed a touch of concern in his tone. Then, as if he had come to some sudden resolution, “I believe you have good nerves, Miss Vidal?”
“Yes,” wonderingly.
“Well, get Fullerton to take, or send, you and your sister into Buluwayo without further delay.”
Now Clare wondered indeed.
“Why?” she said simply.
“Yes, that’s a fair question. But if I explain, will you undertake not to get panic-stricken, and also to leave events to me – in short, not to give away what I may tell you, no, not even to your sister.”
“Why, of course. But – you don’t mean to say these savages are meditating a war – on us?”
“Yes I do. And not only that, but the whole thing is cut and dried, and it’s only a question when to begin. Now I shall be able to answer your other question. You thought me no end boorish and ungracious yesterday. Well, the reason why I stuck to old Qubani like a brother, instead of being of service to you, was that, if I had not, the whole of Gandela would at this moment be a heap of ashes, and the race-course piled with the bodies of every man, woman, and child in the place.”
“Good Heavens! You don’t mean that?” ejaculated Clare, staring at him.
“Certainly I do. There was an impi stationed here – up here where we are sitting, and at a signal from Qubani it was to rush the whole show. And then – ”
“What was the signal?”
“He was to throw up the red cap he was wearing. It was to be done during the prize-giving, so as to be less noticeable.”
“And – you prevented him?”
“I should think so. I showed him a six-shooter – I had one in each pocket – and promised to blow his head off if he didn’t give me that red cap right there. Now a native is nothing if not practical, and the fact of all in Gandela being massacred was nothing to this one if he wasn’t there to see the fun, as, of course, he wouldn’t be. So – he handed over the red cap. I own, though, it was rather a tense moment while he was sort of hesitating whether to do so or not.”
Clare could only gasp, and stared speechless at this man, whom she had heard her brother-in-law, and others, describe as something of a coward – and of whom she, in spite of her better instincts, had thought sorely and with resentment only yesterday, by reason of what she termed to herself his ‘rudeness’ in flatly refusing to do what she had asked him. Good Heavens! And all the time, by his nerve and cool-headedness, he had saved her and the whole settlement from a hideous death. What a cool, masterful, resourceful brain was here.
“But, Mr Lamont,” she broke forth at last, “how did you know that this awful thing was contemplated – was to happen?”
“Well, that’s something of a story. I heard it among them – heard the whole scheme in all its details. Of course they don’t know that, or I shouldn’t be alive here, talking to you at this moment. Indeed, the amazement of the old witch-doctor at finding himself euchred imparted a comic element into a most confoundedly tragical situation.”
Clare looked at him in silence. She was turning over in her mind the events of the previous day. She remembered how the fact of him appearing in a coat had been commented on as an out-of-the-way circumstance. Now it all stood explained. It was to conceal the deadly weapon wherewith he had compelled the treacherous Matabele to abandon his murderous plan. And what an awful contrast was there – that gathering, as unsuspecting and light-hearted as though in the midst of peaceful England, while not a mile away hovered a storm-cloud of bloodthirsty savages awaiting the signal to overwhelm the whole in a whirlwind of massacre and agonising death. And this had been averted by the coolness and resolution of one man.
“You may or may not have noticed that the old ruffian was wearing two caps, a red and a white?”
“Yes, I remarked on that,” said Clare. “I wondered his head didn’t split.”
“Well, the white cap was to be the signal that the time was not ripe. I made him throw up that, and hooray with the rest of us.”
“Yes, I remember that too, and how we all laughed.”
“Of course I primed him with the state of preparedness we were all in, though not seeming to be – and that there were Maxims hidden under that waggon sail instead of soda-water bottles. Good Lord, if the bar-keeper had sent his boy to get out a fresh box of the same! but he didn’t, luckily.”
“Yes, indeed. But what have you done about the affair, Mr Lamont? and is the old witch-doctor in prison?”
“As yet I’ve done nothing except come up here the first thing this morning and verify the whole affair. And I have. There are abundant traces that a large number of Matabele have occupied this ground for hours. Look at the thing you picked up – do you know what it is?”
“This?” said Clare, holding out the cow-tails on the string.
“Yes. Well, that is part of the regular war-gear. It is tied round the leg above the calf – and this thing you found forms an important ‘pièce de conviction.’ It is never worn when moving about in the ordinary way. Well, old Qubani is not detained, because I saw it answered my purpose best to let him go.”