by John Buchan
“Imperialism, then,” said Lord Appin, “is to be defined from the English point of view as a kind of national old age pensions scheme?”
But Mr Wakefield, having had his say, and having secured, as he believed, the assent of his audience, was not to be disturbed by any epigram.
“I accept the definition gladly,” he said. “That is Imperialism on the business side. The other sides — and I grant you they are many — I leave to people more competent to deal with them.”
Carey walked to one of the shelves and took down a book.
“Do you remember,” he said, “a passage in which John Davis, the Elizabethan seaman, held out a prospect for his countrymen? I fear he was actually talking of the North Pole, where his dreams have not been realised; but we can apply his words to the ideal of a united empire: —
“‘How blessed may we think this nation to be, for they are in perpetual light, and never know what darkness meaneth, by the benefit of twilight and full moons, as the learned in astronomy do very well know; which people, if they have the notice of their eternity by the comfortable light of the Gospels, then are they blessed, and of all nations most blessed. Why then do we neglect the search of this excellent discovery, against which there can be nothing said to hinder the same? Why do we refuse to see the dignity of God’s creation, since it hath pleased the Divine Majesty to place us the nearest neighbour thereunto? I know there is no true Englishman that can in conscience refuse to be a contributor to procure this so great a happiness to his country, whereby not only the prince and mighty men of the land shall be highly renowned, but also the merchants, tradesmen, and artificers mightily enriched.’
You see what an old creed ours is, and how catholic in its application. You will find cover under these words, Wakefield, for your practicality, and Marjory for her transcendentalism, and Teddy for his romance. I think we may close our discussion for the evening with John Davis, who makes a good tail-piece. For the next two days we shall let the matter rest, for some of us are going hunting. On the evening of the day after to-morrow I propose that we take up another question of detail, and a very practical one — our tropical possessions.”
Considine rose and marched resolutely from the room. “If you and Alastair,” he said to Hugh, “expect to be ready at four to-morrow morning, you had better get to bed.”
Lady Flora looked at him with stem disapproval. “Am I to be allowed to come?” she asked.
“My dear child!” said Mrs Yorke. “They are going after lions! Besides, what about the conventions?”
The girl shook an impatient head. “You have broken our compact at the very beginning,” she whispered to Hugh. “If I were not such a Christian and such a lady, I should be seriously annoyed. But you are quite wrong if you think that you’ll have any adventures as good as I shall have here. I am going straight off into the wilds on the white pony to make friends with Prester John.”
CHAPTER V.
THE stars, which had been shining with a frosty brilliance, were paling towards dawn before Hugh was sufficiently awake to see where he was going. He had been routed out by Alastair Graham in the small hours, and had somehow found himself on a horse, in a great blanket-coat, with half-a-dozen dusky figures trotting alongside. He had been jogging on for half an hour before he finally rubbed sleep out of his eyes, and, drinking long draughts of the electric air, roused himself to some interest in life. The sky was changing from black to some ineffable shade of purple, and the track among the mimosa thorns was beginning to glimmer ahead in a fantastic grey. Soon remoter objects distinguished themselves — a kopje, a big tree, a jag of rock. And then over the crest of the far downs came a red arc of fire, and the heavens changed to amethyst and saffron, and, last of all, to a delicate pale blue, where wisps of rosy cloud hung like the veils of the morning. They were near the western edge of the escarpment, and, looking down into the trough, Hugh saw over the great sea of mist the blue fingers of far mountains rising clear and thin into the sky. The air was bitter cold, and the cheeks tingled with the light wind which attends the dawn. Lines of Theocritus — the ‘alektor kokkuzon napkaisi’ of the Seventh Idyll — ran in Hugh’s mind from his reading of yesterday. He realised that his senses had become phenomenally acute. His eyes seemed to see farther, his ears to mark the least sound in the bush, while the scents of the morning came to his nostrils with a startling freshness. Pungent, clean, yet with an indescribable tropic softness in it, was the air of the desert, which he sniffed like the Scriptural wild ass. He looked round at his companions. Graham, a burly figure in a sheepskin coat, rode somewhat in the manner in which Napoleon is painted as retreating from Moscow, sitting squarely in the saddle with a meditative chin on his breast. Considine’s long lean figure on a blue roan seemed wholly in keeping with the landscape. He wore an old khaki suit and a broad-brimmed felt hat, and sat his horse as loosely as a Boer. He leaned forward, peering keenly about him, whistling some catch of song. In civilised places he looked the ordinary far-travelled sportsman, a little browner and tougher, perhaps, than most. But the Considine of the Turf Club and the Considine of the veld were different beings. The bright eyes, set deep in the dark face, and the sinewy strength of his pose gave him the air of some Elizabethan who had sailed strange seas to a far country. To Hugh at the moment he seemed the primal type of the adventurer.
Soon the travellers were greeted by the most comforting of all the scents of the wilds — the smell of a wood fire, and the faint odour of roasting coffee. Their boys had made their breakfast-camp in the crook of a little stream, where the forest ended and the long downs of the northern plateau began. In a few minutes Hugh was sitting luxuriously on a pile of rugs, drinking excellent coffee out of a tin mug. The Trappist silence of the early ride was over.
“You’ll get none of the luxury of Musuru here, my boy,” Considine said. “We are going to have the same fare as Alastair and I enjoyed a week ago — tinned stuff and what we kill. You’ve hunted yourself, and know that to eat potted meat with your fingers out of a tin after a hard day is better than a dinner at the Ritz. Akhub,” he cried, “what about the beats?”
The chief shikari — Zanzibari Arab, ex-slave-trader, and heaven knows what besides — bowed gravely, and informed his master that he had arranged for Graham to go due east into the down country, where buck and rhino were plentiful; Considine should keep on to the north, where he had a better chance of a good eland head; while Hugh was to remain on the edge of the escarpment, where lay the best chance of lion.
Considine nodded. “You’ll want your Mannlicher for buck,” he said to Hugh, “and your 400 cordite express. For pity’s sake don’t go into the bush after lion without the express. Akhub is going with you and will look after you. I want you to get a lion, but remember he is worth taking pains about, or he may get you. I’ve twice been clawed by them, and it’s no sort of fun.”
Breakfast over, the parties separated, and Hugh with the shikari and five boys set out along the rim of the plateau. A pleasurable excitement, with just a shade of trepidation in it, flavoured his morning pipe. He yearned to get a lion, but he had some nervousness lest he might show up badly in a tight place, having never before faced anything more dangerous than a sleepy Norwegian bear. He was a good shot enough in a Scotch deer-forest, but a situation where a miss meant not annoyance but mortal peril was new to his experience.
The cold morning changed to a hot noonday, and at two in the afternoon Hugh sat down to lunch, in a better frame of mind. He had got two hartebeests with fair heads, and in a marshy place a really fine waterbuck. His anxiety, he found, had not impaired his steadiness, and he was recovering his composure. He was still soft from civilised life and tormented by a thirst which several cups of hot tea barely assuaged. Lunch was perforce a short meal since he had to meet the others at a certain point which Akhub declared was three hours’ riding ahead, and if he wished for more hunting there was no time to be lost.
The afternoon’s trek was hot and dusty, and he had little sp
ort. Green doves and a whitetailed hawk were the only signs of life in the bush, which seemed to lie torpid in a universal drowsiness. By-and-by they entered a timber tract, where large acacias and junipers made glades like an English park. It was drawing towards evening, and according to Akhub’s calculations another half-hour would bring them into touch with the rest of the party. Hugh had almost abandoned the thought of sport, when a sudden cry of ‘ngatun-yo from the boys made him look down a tributary glade. He saw a great yellow beast, like an overgrown dog, go lolloping across into a thicket of trees, and with a beating heart he recognised that he was at last in the presence of a veritable lion.
Earlier in the day he had carefully planned out his conduct. He would quickly yet calmly take the express from the bearer, and circumspectly yet swiftly reconnoitre the ground for a shot. Alas for good resolutions! At the first sight of that tawny back Hugh was off in pursuit down the glade at full gallop, while an agitated boy waved the neglected weapon in his rear. He had his Mannlicher on his saddle-bow, and almost unconsciously he slipped in cartridges while his eyes searched the environs for a sign of his quarry.
Suddenly he saw him a hundred yards ahead trotting along a narrow native path. He was going slowly, unconscious apparently of the proximity of man. Hugh dismounted, hitched his well-broken horse to a tree, and sent a flying shot at the beast, which had the effect of making him halt for a second, look round, and then turn into the shade of the trees on the right. Hugh ran up to where he had entered, and a little nervously looked into the sparse bush. There was the lion well in range, so, kneeling down and aiming carefully, he fired. A shot from behind is never easy, and as it chanced the bullet went low and shattered the left hind leg. The beast stopped with a growl of pain, turned slowly round and looked at the intruder, lashing the low bushes with his tail.
The moment had come for a second shot, and Hugh got it in full on the chest, but a little too high for the heart. An express bullet would have stretched him out, but the little Mannlicher had no such power. The great beast roared in fury, caught sight of his enemy behind a tree-trunk, advanced a pace, and then gathered himself for a charge.
With a nervous hand Hugh had managed to slip in fresh cartridges, and as the lion moved he fired. It was a clean miss, and Hugh had a confused sense of something yellow and evilsmelling flying through the air as he leaped aside. Whether consciously or unconsciously, he had fired his second barrel, and the next he knew he was picking himself up, unhurt but shaken and blood-stained, from beneath a branch which the lion had broken, while the creature himself lay stone-dead a yard off. The last shot had by a miracle found the heart.
Hugh’s first impulse was to make assurance sure by firing into the body, but a moment’s inspection convinced him that there was no life left. Then his mood became one of insane jubilation. Alone and with the wrong rifle he had killed his lion. He felt three inches taller; he longed for Akhub, for Considine, for any one to come and see. And then a growl behind him made him turn his head, and he forgot his pride in abject terror. For there, about twelve yards off, was a second lion, bigger and darker in the mane, glaring at him wrathfully with his ugly jaws half-open.
His hand went to his cartridge-belt, only to find it empty. He felt his pockets, but not a cartridge remained. They had dropped out in the fall and lay some yards off beyond the dead beast.
Hugh did the only thing possible, and sprang for the nearest tree. He was not a moment too soon, for as his quaking body was swung up to the second branch something tore at his leg, and the next moment he was contemplating boot and gaiter ripped off at the back and a long scratch in the flesh. In the same second he seemed to hear a shot ring out — no ping of a Mannlicher, but the honest thunder of an express — and the long dark face of Akhub appeared in the glade.
It was a very chastened hunter who descended the tree to receive the congratulations and reproaches of the chief shikari. It was abundantly clear to him that he had done an unpardonable thing, and, but for the activity of his boys and the near neighbourhood of the tree, might have been stretched tom and dying beside his quarry. But the mood could not last. The exhilaration of a successful adventure came back to him. After all, he had walked up his lion with a small-bore and killed him unaided. With huge pleasure he now saw that his own animal was the finer and bigger of the two.
He lit a pipe and jogged on in the deepening twilight, his whole soul filled with the joy of conquest. This was life indeed, for, say what we may, there is no satisfaction so intense as victory over some one of the savage forces of nature. Better for the moment than viceroyalties or Garters or millions is the joy of making the first ascent of some hard peak, or sailing a boat home through a tempest, or seeing some wild animal fall before your own courage and skill. In that hour Hugh would not have changed places with Launceston or Carey.
Soon he came into the glow of a big fire Lanterns were hanging from the boughs of a huge juniper, and beds were being got ready underneath. At little fires close by the boys were cooking supper.
The others welcomed him with a great shout. “Well, what luck?”
“Two lions,” said Hugh, with studied modesty. “One mine and one Akhub’s — and a few buck.”
“Gad! you’ve had the cream of the day,” said Considine. “I got nothing but a hartebeest. And Alastair never had a shot. How did you get your lion?”
Hugh told his story to a disapproving audience. “You foolhardy young devil! Though, after all, I suppose I’ve done the same thing in my time. How’s your leg?”
“A scratch. Only wants a simple dressing. I’ve learned my lesson all right, for I never was in such a blue funk in my life. You don’t find me stalking lion with a Mannlicher again. For heaven’s sake, old man, give me a drink.”
Considine, following the bushveld ritual, doled out to each a small whisky-and-soda. “Keep that in mind, Hugh, when you next go on trek. After a long day you want a pick-me-up before you dine, or you can’t eat; and if you can’t eat you can’t sleep, and if you can’t sleep you get fever as sure as fate. Never touch the stuff in the daytime, and I’m against it at dinner, but as a pick-me-up there’s nothing like it.”
They sat down with tremendous appetites to that best of meals, a hunter’s supper. There was tinned soup, which they drank out of mugs, curried guinea-fowl which Alastair had shot, venison-steaks stewed with onions, and a species of tinned plum-pudding which was the joy of Considine’s heart. Coffee and peach brandy completed the courses, and then the three got into sleeping-bags, had more logs put on the fire, lit their pipes, and prepared for the slow talk which merges gradually in slumber.
Hugh snuggled into his kaross with a profound sense of comfort. He felt warm, satisfied, and indomitably cheerful. Never had his pipe seemed sweeter; never had he felt his mind more serene or his body more instinct with life. The wide glade was lit up by the fire, and the high branches made a kind of emerald canopy picked out with the golden points of stars. The boys were singing monotonous native songs around their bivouac, and through the wood came the eerie rustling of night winds. A zareba of thorns had been built round the camp, close to which the horses and mules stood patiently champing their fodder. The camp was a miniature city, with its fortifications and its watchmen, and Hugh felt himself in a new world — the hunter’s civilisation, the oasis which he makes anew for himself each night in wilds which are careless of human life. For a moment his mind travelled back to Musuru, where at that hour delicately clad women would be sitting down to rich food amid flowers and silver and white linen. The contrast was so piquant that in the catholic mind it awoke the spirit of comedy.
“What are you cackling at, Hugh?” Considine asked. “Fling me your tobacco-pouch like a good chap, for mine’s empty. Lord! how often I’ve lain like this and smoked and looked up at the sky. And how many good fellows have done the same and are at it still! It’s all very well for Wakefield and the rest to theorise about Empire. I daresay it is logical and scientific enough. But you can’t get the feeling of
all it means till you’ve got very close to the bones of the old Earth, and heard her muttering to herself, and realised what a tough old fiend she is and what a job it is to get even with her.”
