Manly Pursuits

by Ann Harries

  ‘Of course, aeroplanes will eventually supersede motorcars,’ he declared in his confident way. ‘Last year I went up for three hundred yards in an American machine – not far I know, but you can see that as far as flying’s concerned, not even the sky’s the limit!’

  Mrs K was growing restless, even in her position of driver’s consort. When the men paused to draw breath in preparation for excited debate on this topic, she cut in swiftly with a revived smile and said, her voice sharp as a sword: ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you two gentleman, but I have a suggestion to make.’

  The men gazed at her vaguely, as if trying to remember who she was. Then good manners forced the Colossus to stammer: ‘A-a suggestion?’

  ‘What I would like to suggest,’ Mrs K’s smile was charming, ‘is a visit to the seaside. In this very vehicle. I have recently discovered that Professor Wills here has spent several days on this estate without once setting foot outside it! In my opinion he needs to roll up his trousers and paddle, and I’m sure the girls would be only too delighted to assist him!’

  I felt myself grow scarlet at her words. The notion of visiting the seaside was to me almost as foreign as that of visiting the Bangweolo Swamps, and my initial reaction was to reject the idea outright. But the little girls had immediately broken into cheers, and both the Colossus and Kipling stroked their moustaches to hide their smiles, while the excitement of my two young assistants grew to fever pitch. I could see that the suggestion had kindled the interest of our host, who, one would think, should have had more important things to do than paddle in the sea.

  ‘My dear Mrs Kipling, what a delightful idea,’ said he. ‘I should like nothing more than to visit my little cottage in Muizenberg. And I can think of nothing more pleasant than rolling up my trousers and refreshing my feet in the Atlantic Ocean. It will take us an hour to get there by automobile. We can paddle for an hour or two and be back in time for supper.’

  ‘Hooray!’ cried Kipling and threw his hat into the air.

  ‘Please, baas!’ whimpered Chamberlain and Salisbury, their eyes brimming with incipient gratitude.

  ‘It will be an entirely new ornithological experience for you,’ said Mrs Kipling as I shrank away from the vehicle into which her husband, wreathed in smiles, was now climbing. ‘There are some quite remarkable waders for you to observe, I can assure you.’

  Fortunately I remembered to look at my fob-watch at this point and was able to exclaim in quite genuine surprise: ‘Oh dear! I’d quite lost track of the time. I’m afraid I have an appointment to keep!’

  ‘And I should like to take this opportunity of interviewing Challenger,’ said Harris, though I don’t believe he had been invited on the trip.

  ‘Oh, Professor, what a shame!’ Mrs K’s face puckered. She looked as if she wanted to query the nature of my appointment, but the Colossus had already started the engine by some mysterious means. With wild cries of delight the boys jumped on to the running board (they would be allowed to remain there as far as the gates).

  Somewhat thankfully, I left Harris and Challenger to each other.

  ‘Ten minutes.’ Milner looked even grimmer than usual. The Cape cart waited outside the front entrance of the Great Granary, the two horses pawing the ground, their reins still in the driver’s hand. ‘In two hours I catch a train to Bloemfontein to meet the Flat Earth disciples. Where is the lady?’ He turned to mount the short flight of steps to the front door.

  He reminded me of a fully wound clockwork toy, let loose to march around in circles. Clearly it would be fatal for him to stop moving.

  ‘Um, if you remember, the arrangement is that we’ll meet her on the mountain. As you’ll appreciate, she can’t very well come to this house.’

  ‘Stupid of me.’ He wheeled round to face me, suddenly half-smiling. ‘I suppose I’m quite intrigued to meet her. Not a beauty, though, is she?’ He was fiddling with his moustaches, nevertheless. ‘Come on, man, I’ve wasted two minutes already.’

  ‘This way.’ I led him across the lawn to the gate and we walked up the path rather more quickly than I might have wished. He was dressed very formally in pin-striped trousers and frock-coat, and carried his top hat under his arm. His head was bent forward in intense thought: he seemed oblivious of the banana trees and oleander that brushed his shoulder – an elephant or tiger would have crossed his path unnoticed.

  Into the dark pine forest we marched, and I hoped that Miss Schreiner had kept her word and was waiting for us in Titania’s grove. The possibility that she might not be there began to stir considerable anxiety in my breast, as I did not feel strong enough to endure Milner’s displeasure.

  ‘How much further?’ he snapped as a mossy log caused him to slip and trip (his highly polished spats were quite unsuitable for this mountainous ascent) straight into the arms of Olive, who was standing ready for his entrance.

  ‘Sir Alfred!’ she cried, and then she too toppled over in a flurry of petticoats and hat-pins, his long body proving too heavy for her. As the two of them struggled on the ground I felt a spasm of regret that my Kodak did not hang around my neck.

  ‘You may laugh, Wills!’ Milner was all elbows and knees, trying to revert to the vertical on the slippery pine needles, while Olive was a dumpy pincushion with her legs splayed out. Her reticule had burst open, discharging its contents all around. Milner’s hat had landed upside down on a rock, as if begging for coins while the concoction on Olive’s head hung at an angle that released a torrent of dark unruly hair. I extended a helping hand.

  ‘Five minutes!’ shouted Milner, a gigantic segmented spider on his knees and hands, one of which held the fob-watch he had removed from his waistcoat pocket.

  Miss Schreiner had a speech of exactly five minutes prepared. Summoning all her energies, and oblivious of the chunks of plant life that now clung to her bottle-green coat, she began to declaim:

  ‘Sir Alfred, I have to ask you to consider a very simple question. It is this: Who gains by war? What is it for? Not England! She has a great young nation’s heart to lose! She has treaties to violate … Not Africa! The great young nation, quickening today to its first consciousness of life, to be torn and rent … Not the brave English soldier. There are no laurels for him here. The dying lads with hands fresh from the plough; the old man tottering to the grave, who seizes the gun to die with it … Who gains by war? Not we the Africans whose hearts are knit to England. We love all. Each hired soldier’s bullet that strikes down a South African does more; it finds a bullet here in our hearts!’

  And she struck her own breast thrice in her tremulous passion. Milner’s facial expression was deadpan. He had finally seated himself on the same fallen log that I had used the day before, and recovered his hat, which he placed upon his precariously crossed knees. Olive continued addressing her audience of one in the same ringing tones:

  ‘It may be said: but what has England to fear in a campaign with a country like Africa? … she can sweep it by mere numbers. We answer yes – she might do it – there is no doubt that England might send out sixty or a hundred thousand hired soldiers to South Africa, and they could bombard our towns and destroy our villages; they could shoot down men in the prime of life, and old men and boys, till there was hardly a kopje in the country without its stain of blood. When the war was over the imported soldier might leave the land – but not all. Some must be left to keep the remaining people down. There would be quiet in the land. South Africa would rise up silently, and count her dead and bury them. Have the dead no voices? In a thousand farmhouses black-robed women would hold memory of the country. There would be silence, but no peace!’ Miss Schreiner paused for dramatic effect.

  ‘There would be peace if all fighting men in arms had been shot or taken prisoner,’ remarked Milner.

  Olive’s eyes lit up. ‘Yes, but what of the women? If there were left but five thousand pregnant South African-born women and all the rest of their people destroyed, these women would breed up again a race like the first!’


  She had finished, and gazed fiercely down at Milner, whose expression had not changed. Then a fleeting contraction of his lower eyelid muscles indicated he was about to speak.

  ‘You have a high opinion of the Boer.’ His voice was distant.

  Miss Schreiner took a deep breath and began again. ‘As a child I was brought up to despise the Boer. I remember being given a handful of sugar by a Boer child and throwing it away when I thought no one was looking because I thought I would have been contaminated if I’d eaten it. But later, when I lived among them for five years as a teacher on their farms, watching them in all the vicissitudes of life from birth to death, I learnt to love the Boer; but more, I learnt to admire him. I learnt that in the African Boer we have one of the most intellectually virile and dominant races the world has seen; a people who beneath a calm and almost stolid surface hide the most intense passions and the most indomitable resolution. Sir Alfred, the British race cannot afford to make an enemy of these people! There is a spiritual depth in the Boer entirely lacking in the treasure hunters and goldbugs who leech off the mines in the North and pretend they have come to Africa for some greater purpose. The Boer loves Africa for her own sake, and curses the day that gold was found in the rocks of their simple Republic!’

  Milner hooded his eyes. ‘So you do not believe in economic progress? You think the world should remain in its primitive state?’

  For a moment Olive wavered. She recognised that this cool man, who respected only restraint and shrewd logic, had opened up a trap into which she must not fall. But her fiery nature could not contain itself, and she broke into inflammatory prose:

  ‘But what does all this vast accumulation of material goods lead to? Does the human creature who craves more and more material possessions become a better creature? I say that the human spirit and even the human body are being crushed under this vast accumulation of material things, this ceaseless thirst for more and more; that the living creature is building up about itself a tomb in which it will finally dwindle and d–’

  Milner stood up, an elaborate unfolding of a multi-jointed gentleman. I heard his knees crack several times.

  ‘Miss Schreiner,’ he declared, ‘I’m afraid my time has run out. These people you describe may be decadent and degenerate in your opinion, but you forget one thing. They are British. And I cannot tolerate the spectacle of thousands of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots, calling vainly to Her Majesty’s Government for redress. I bid you good afternoon.’

  I detected a click of highly polished heels among the pine needles. Olive looked as if she might fling herself at these very heels: instead, she straightened her stricken hat and said, in an altered voice: ‘You do not see the larger issue. Thank you for your time.’ Her face was grey.

  Milner began his descent and I started to follow him, feeling I did not have the strength to remain with Olive in her state of mind. But even as I timidly moved into the shadow of the august High Commissioner of South Africa, Olive grabbed my arm with frightening strength, and pulled me back.

  ‘Stay!’ she hissed. Her eyes were wilder than I had ever seen them. ‘I have another card to play. But I need your help. Together we can still save this country from the catastrophe of war!’

  Alfred the tarantula lasted two years in a glass box contained in a larger box of straw in my bedroom. I gained a certain notoriety through being his owner. He was the only pet I have ever had. He allowed me to stroke his furry back. One day I found him dead in the straw, his legs neatly folded. I grieved, but made no effort to replace him.

  Violins appeared to be playing in Miss Schreiner’s chest. Brushing a frond of fern from her skirt, she informed me, in a voice which sliced through this delicate string accompaniment: ‘You may be interested to hear that my brother Will is Prime Minister of this colony!’

  Her hand was still on my arm. We could hear Milner beating his retreat down the mountain path. I pulled my elbow free.

  ‘Miss Schreiner, I have business to attend to.’

  How is it that some people can command by the timbre of their voice alone? Miss Schreiner looked absurd: her hat was askew and her clothes covered in foliage, but her speech, wild as it was, brimmed with an absolute assurance which cannot be ignored: like an obedient dog I stayed and heard her out, though longing to escape to some ill-defined freedom. (I once heard an old woman calmly require a street urchin to return the purse he had just picked from her pocket: as if mesmerised, he complied with her request, even muttering a few words of apology. I have absolutely no doubt that had I attempted to address him in the same way I would have had mud or worse slung in my eye, accompanied by a barrage of impudent imitations and verbal assaults.)

  Olive began to speak.

  Miss Schreiner Tells Another Story

  Once, like herself, Miss Schreiner’s brother Will had been among the Colossus’ most ardent disciples. In his mind there was no question but that this man of genius would unite the Colony’s disparate elements and open up all of Africa to the benevolent influence of Great Britain.

  ‘But below the fascinating surface the worms of falsehood and corruption were creeping,’ hissed Miss Schreiner. ‘He thought nothing of betraying his loyalest supporters in order to become the most powerful man in South Africa!’ On the night of Jameson’s fiasco, as the gallant raiders galloped across the Transvaal border to their own destruction and that of the entire country, Will, by then the Colony’s Attorney General, had visited the Colossus in his library. He had found a broken man, in the company of a sycophantic secretary.

  Miss Schreiner, wheezing horribly, said to me: ‘You must know the sonnet Ozymandias by Shelley. The traveller from an antique land finds a shattered visage of stone, half sunk in the desert sands, its wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command still intact, though the mighty statue is wrecked. That is the image that instantly occurred to Will as he entered the library and saw his Prime Minister hunched in his chair, his eyes red, his face unshaven. He had aged ten years. He did not greet my brother, but lifted his mighty head and exclaimed at once –’ (and here Miss Schreiner placed the back of her hand against her brow and rolled her eyes, in a satire of despair) ‘“Yes yes, it’s true! Old Jameson has upset my apple-cart: he has ridden in!” Will grew frantic, understanding at once the implications of this act of rashness, and begged his master to think of some way of stopping the madcap doctor from his dash to disaster. Even at this stage a telegram could have halted the futile incursion. But Ozymandias knew he was already ruined.

  ‘“I thought I’d stopped him! I sent messages to stop him! Twenty years we’ve been friends, and now he goes in and ruins me! I can’t hinder him. I can’t go and destroy him!”

  ‘Attempting to assume a mantle of calm, Will asked: “How far are you implicated?”

  ‘Ozymandias replied in his strange, soprano voice: “It had my backing, Will – the whole thing, from first to last. Johannesburg, Jameson, everything.”

  ‘Will stared at the man whom he had loved and trusted with all the purity of his simple heart. It was almost impossible for him to believe what he was hearing: he longed to awaken and find that this was but a terrifying nightmare. But there was to be no such solace. After a long silence Will asked: “Will you resign?” And Ozymandias replied: “I have done so already! I am finished!” He did not disguise his bitterness.

  ‘Even though he was aghast at these revelations, my brother stayed with his master for four hours that dreadful night. During this time, Ozymandias cried out repeatedly that he was finished, that it was Jameson’s fault for going in when he knew there was to be no uprising in Johannesburg, no frantic women or children to save, that it was his own fault for setting Jameson up. Every now and then he would stagger up from his desk and begin to pace back and forth in the library, scarcely touching the whisky and soda at his elbow, so great was his agitation. Tobacco was his only solace: Will says the smog of London was nothing compared to the fog of guilty smoke that filled the library that night. And
in these surges of impotent energy he would call out the name of our Colonial Secretary: “Chamberlain! He’s in it up to the neck!” Then a grimace that was intended to be a smile would distort his mouth. Even in his anguish he could be cunning. “If he denies it, I’ve got him by the short hairs!”

  ‘My poor brother enquired as to the meaning of this assertion. Ozymandias pointed to a pile of telegrams and letters dating back some years which now lay in a heap on his desk. Will glanced through them. His heart sank even lower. The telegrams indicated beyond doubt that Chamberlain had long been in favour of the Raid as a means of ousting the Afrikaners who stood in the way of his imperial designs! He had supported it in the usual convoluted, ambiguous way of politicians: at the very least he knew it was going to happen and that Great Britain would benefit immeasurably. Yet at that very minute Chamberlain was publicly condemning the Raid as a flagrant piece of filibustering, and sending off apologies to the old Boer President himself!’

  Miss Schreiner fixed her fierce dark eyes on me, and I returned her gaze meekly. ‘During the Committee of Inquiry, set up to discover exactly who the guilty parties were in this bungled affair, we expected these telegrams to be produced and Chamberlain’s involvement revealed to the world. But the telegrams – eight of them – went mysteriously missing!’ Miss Schreiner’s indignation caused her bronchial string-trio to multiply into a veritable orchestra, and her shoulders heaved painfully at the effort of speaking. Ignoring these obstacles, she continued with her scornful denunciation. ‘Needless to say, everyone was squared to keep quiet: Ozymandias and Chamberlain were intent on saving their own bacon, and the Lying in State at Westminster achieved nothing. Professor Wills, I have failed to convince Milner that war will utterly destroy this land. There is only one other course of action left to me. I must have those telegrams! And only you can get them for me!’