To the other boys he was what his nature and training had made him – not really a bully, but masterful and overriding. He gave his orders with the curtness of a drill sergeant and the rude assurance of a savage chief. Walking, he walked his course, giving way for none of them. At the outspan or on the road or footpath he shouldered them aside as one walks through standing corn, not aggressively but with the superb indifference of right and habit unquestioned. If one, loitering before him, blocked his way unseeing, there was no pause or step aside – just ‘Suka!’ (‘Get out’) and a push that looked effortless enough but sent the offender staggering; or, if he had his sticks, more likely a smart whack on the stern that was still more surprising; and not even the compliment of a glance back from Jim as he stalked on. He was like the old bull in a herd – he walked his course; none molested and none disputed; the way opened before him.
When sober Jim spoke Zulu; when drunk, he broke into the strangest and most laughable medley of kitchen-Kaffir, bad Dutch and worse English – the idea being in part to consider our meaner intelligences and in part to show what an accomplished linguist he was. There was no difficulty in knowing when Jim would go wrong: he broke out whenever he got a chance, whether at a kraal, where he could always quicken the reluctant hospitality of any native, at a wayside canteen or in a town. Money was fatal – he drank it all out; but want of money was no security, for he was known to everyone and seemed to have friends everywhere; and if he had not, he made them on the spot – annexed and overwhelmed them.
From time to time you do meet people like that. The world’s their oyster and the gift of a masterful and infinite confidence opens it every time: they walk through life taking of the best as a right, and the world unquestionably submits.
I had many troubles with Jim, but never on account of white men: drunk or sober, there was never trouble there. It may have been Rorke’s Drift and Ulundi that did it; but whatever it was, the question of black and white was settled in his mind for ever. He was respectful, yet stood upright with the rough dignity of an unvanquished spirit; but on the one great issue he never raised his hand or voice again. His troubles all came from drink, and the exasperation was at times almost unbearable – so great, indeed, that on many occasions I heartily repented ever having taken him on. Warnings were useless, and punishment – well, the shiny new skin that made patterns in lines and stars and crosses on his back for the rest of his life made answer for always upon that point.
The trials and worries were often great indeed. The trouble began as soon as we reached a town, and he had a hundred excuses for going in, and a hundred more for not coming out: he had someone to see, boots to be mended, clothes to buy or medicine to get – the only illness I ever knew him have was ‘a pain inside’, and the only medicine wanted – grog! Someone owed him money – a stock excuse, and the idea of Jim, always penniless and always in debt, posing as a creditor never failed to raise a laugh, and he would shake his head with a half fierce half sad disgust at the general scepticism and his failure to convince me. Then he had relations in every town! Jim, the sole survivor of his fighting kraal, produced ‘blulus’, ‘babas’, ‘sisteles’, and even ‘mamas’, in profusion, and they died just before we reached the place, as regularly as the office boy’s aunt dies before Derby Day and with the same consequence – he had to go to the funeral.
The first precaution was to keep him at the waggons and put the towns and canteens ‘out of bounds’; and the last defence, to banish him entirely until he came back sober, and meanwhile set other boys to do his work, paying them his wages in cash in his presence when he returned fit for duty.
‘Is it as I told you? Is it just?’ I would ask when this was done.
‘It is just, Inkos,’ he would answer with a calm dispassionate simplicity which appealed for forgiveness and confidence with far greater force than any repentance; and it did so because it was genuine; it was natural and unstudied. There was never a trace of feeling to be detected when these affairs were squared off, but I knew how he hated the treatment and it helped a little from time to time to keep him right.
The banishing of him from the waggons in order that he might go away and have it over was not a device to save myself trouble and I did it only when it was clear that he could stand the strain no longer. It was simply a choice of evils, and it seemed to me better to let him go, clearly understanding the conditions, than drive him into breaking away with the bad results to him and the bad effects on the others of disobeying orders. It was, as a rule, far indeed from saving me trouble, for after the first bout of drinking he almost invariably found his way back to the waggons: the drink always produced a ravenous craving for meat, and when his money was gone and he had fought his fill and cleared out all opposition, he would come back to the waggons at any hour of the night, perhaps even two or three times between dark and dawn, to beg for meat. Warnings and orders had no effect whatever; he was unconscious of everything except the overmastering craving for meat. He would come to my waggon and begin that deadly monotonous recitation, ‘Funa ‘nyama, Inkos! Wanta meat, Baas!’ There was a kind of hopeless determination in the tone conveying complete indifference to all consequences: meat he must have. He was perfectly respectful; every order to be quiet or go away or go to bed was received with the formal raising of the hand aloft, the most respectful of salutations, and the assenting, ‘Inkos!’ But in the very next breath would come the old monotonous request, ‘Funa ‘nyama, Inkos,’ just as if he was saying it for the first time. The persistency was awful – it was maddening; and there was no remedy, for it was not the result of voluntary or even conscious effort on his part; it was a sort of automatic process, a result of his physical condition. Had he known it would cost him his life, he could no more have resisted it than have resisted breathing.
When the meat was there I gave it, and he would sit by the fire for hours eating incredible quantities – cutting it off in slabs and devouring it when not much more than warmed. But it was not always possible to satisfy him in that way; meat was expensive in the towns and often we had none at all at the waggons. Then the night became one long torment: the spells of rest might extend from a quarter of an hour to an hour; then from the dead sleep of downright weariness I would be roused by the deep, far-reaching voice; Funa ‘nyama, Inkos’ wove itself into my dreams, and waking I would find Jim standing beside me remorselessly urging the same request in Zulu, in broken English and in Dutch – ‘My wanta meat, Baas’, ‘Wil fleisch krij, Baas’, and the old, old hatefully familiar explanation of the difference between ‘man’s food’ and ‘piccanins’ food’, interspersed with grandiose declarations that he was ‘Makokela – Jim Makokel’ ’, who ‘catchum lion ‘live’. Sometimes he would expand this into comparisons between himself and the other boys, much to their disadvantage; and on those occasions he invariably worked round to his private grievances, and expressed his candid opinions of Sam.
Sam was the boy whom I usually set to do Jim’s neglected work. He was a ‘mission boy’, that is a Christian kaffir – very proper in his behaviour, but a weakling and not much good at work. Jim would enumerate all Sam’s shortcomings; how he got his oxen mixed up on dark nights and could not pick them out of the herd – a quite unpardonable offence; how he stuck in the drifts and had to be ‘double-spanned’ and pulled out by Jim; how he once lost his way in the bush; and how he upset the waggon coming down the Devil’s Shoot.
Jim had once brought down the Berg from Spitzkop a loaded waggon on which there was a cottage piano packed standing upright. The road was an awful one, it is true, and few drivers could have handled so top-heavy a load without capsizing – he had received a bonsela for his skill – but to him the feat was one without parallel in the history of waggon driving; and when drunk he usually coupled it with his other great achievement of catching a lion alive. His contempt for Sam’s misadventure on the Devil’s Shoot was therefore great, and to it was added resentment against Sam’s respectability and superior education, which the lat
ter was able to rub in in safety by ostentatiously reading his Bible aloud at nights as they sat round the fire. Jim was a heathen and openly affirmed his conviction that a Christian kaffir was an impostor, a bastard and a hypocrite – a thing not to be trusted under any circumstances whatever. The end of his morose outburst was always the same. When his detailed indictment of Sam was completed he would wind up with ‘My catchum lion ‘live. My bling panyanna fon Diskop (I bring piano from Spitzkop). My naam Makokela: Jim Makokel’. Sam no good; Sam leada Bible (Sam reads the Bible). Sam no good!’ The intensity of conviction and the gloomy disgust put into the last reference to Sam are not to be expressed in words.
Where warning and punishment availed nothing, threats would have been worse than foolish. Once, when he had broken bounds and left the waggons, I threatened that if he did it again I would tie him up, since he was like a dog that could not be trusted; and I did it. He had no excuse but the old ones; someone, he said, had brought him liquor to the waggons and he had not known what he was doing. The truth was that the craving grew so with the nearer prospect of drink that by hook or by crook he would find someone, a passer-by or a boy from other waggons, to fetch some for him; and after that nothing could hold him.
If Jim ever wavered in his loyalty to me, it must have been the day I tied him up: he must have been very near hating me then. I had caught him as he was leaving the waggons and still sober; brought him back and told him to sit under his own waggon where I would tie him up like a dog. I took a piece of sail twine, tied it to one wrist and, fastening the other end to the waggon wheel, left him.
A kaffir’s face becomes, when he wishes it, quite inscrutable – as expressionless as a blank wall. But there are exceptions to every rule and Jim’s stoicism was not equal to this occasion. The look of unspeakable disgust and humiliation on his face was more than I could bear with comfort; after half an hour or so in the pillory I released him. He did not say a word but, heedless of the hot sun, rolled himself in his blankets and, sleeping or not, never moved for the rest of the day.
The Allies
Jock disliked kaffirs: so did Jim. To Jim there were three big divisions of the human race – white men, Zulus and niggers. Zulu, old or young, was greeted by him as equal, friend and comrade; but the rest were trash, and he cherished a most particular contempt for the Shangaans and Chopis, as a lot who were just about good enough for what they did – that is, work in the mines. They could neither fight nor handle animals; and the sight of them stirred him to contempt and pricked him to hostilities.
It was not long before Jim discovered this bond of sympathy between him and Jock, and I am perfectly sure that the one bad habit which Jock was never cured of was due to deliberate discouragement from Jim at every possible opportunity. It would have been a matter of difficulty and patience in any case to teach Jock not to unnecessarily attack strange kaffirs. It was very important that he should have nothing to do with them, and should treat them with suspicion as possible enemies and keep them off the premises. I was glad that he did it by his own choice and instinct; but this being so, it needed all the more intelligence and training to get him to understand just where to draw the line. Jim made it worse; he made the already difficult task practically impossible by egging Jock on; and what finally made it quite impossible was the extremely funny turn it took, which caused such general amusement that everyone joined in the conspiracy and backed up Jock.
Everyone knows how laughable it is to see a person dancing about like a mad dervish, with legs and arms going in all directions, dodging the rushes of a dog, especially if the spectator knows that the dog will not do any real harm and is more intent on scaring his victim, just for the fun of the thing, than on hunting him. Well, that is how it began.
As far as I know the first incident arose out of the intrusion of a strange kaffir at one of the outspans. Jock objected, and he was forcing a scared boy back step by step – doing the same feinting rushes that he practised with game – until the boy tripped over a camp stool and sat plump down on the three-legged pot of porridge cooking at the campfire. I did not see it; for Jock was, as usual, quite silent – a feature which always had a most terrifying effect on his victims: it was a roar like a lion’s from Jim that roused me. Jock was standing off with his feet on the move forwards and backwards, his head on one side and his face full of interest, as if he would dearly love another romp in; and the waggon boys were reeling and rolling about the grass, helpless with laughter.
A dog is just as quick as a child to find out when he can take liberties; he knows that laughter and serious disapproval do not go together and Jock with the backing of the boys thoroughly enjoyed himself. That was how it began; and by degrees it developed into the great practical joke. The curious thing to note was the way in which Jock entered into the spirit of the thing, and how he improved and varied his methods. It was never certain what he would do; sometimes it would be a wild romp, as it was that day; at other times he would stalk the intruder in the open, much as a pointer approaches his birds in the last strides and, with eyes fixed steadily and mouth tightly pursed up, he would move straight at him with infinite slowness and deliberation until the boy’s nerve failed, and he turned and ran. At other times again he trotted out as if he had seen nothing, and then stopped suddenly. If the boy came on, Jock waited; but if there was any sign of fear or hesitation, he lowered his head, humped up his shoulders – as a stagy boxer does when he wants to appear ferocious – and gave his head a kind of chuck forward, as if in the act of charging: this seldom failed to shake the intruder’s nerve, and as soon as he turned or backed, the romp began. Still another trick was to make a round in the bush and come up behind unobserved, and then make a furious dash with rumbly gurgly growls; the startled boy invariably dropped all he had, breaking into a series of fantastic capers and excited yells, to the huge delight of Jim and the others.
But these things were considered trifles: the piece that always ‘brought the house down’ was the Shangaan gang trick, which on one occasion nearly got us all into serious trouble. The natives going to or from the goldfields travel in gangs of from four or five to forty or fifty; they walk along in Indian file and, even when going across the veld or walking on wide roads, they wind along singly in the footsteps of the leader. What prompted the dog to start this new game I cannot imagine: certainly no one could have taught it to him; and as well as one could judge, he did it entirely ‘off his own bat’, without anything to lead up to or suggest it.
One day a gang of about thirty of these Shangaans, each carrying his load of blankets, clothing, pots, billies and other valuables on his head, was coming along a footpath beside the road some twenty yards away from the waggons. Jock strolled out and sat himself down in the middle of the path; it was the way he did it and his air, utterly devoid of hostile or even serious purpose, that attracted my attention without rousing any doubts. The leader of the gang, however, was suspicious and shied off wide into the veld; he passed in a semicircle round Jock, a good ten yards away, and came safely back to the path again, and the dog with his nose in the air merely eyed him with a look of humorous interest and mild curiosity. The second kaffir made the loop shorter, and the third shorter still, as they found their alarm and suspicions unjustified; and so on, as each came along, the loop was lessened until they passed in safety, almost brushing against Jock’s nose. And still he never budged – never moved – except, as each boy approached, to look up at his face and, slowly turning his head, follow him round with his eyes until he re-entered the path. There was something extremely funny in the mechanical regularity with which his head swung round. It was so funny that not only the boys at the waggons noticed it and laughed; the unsuspecting Shangaans themselves shared the joke. When half a dozen had passed round in safety, comments followed by grunts of agreement or laughter ran along the line, and then, as each fresh boy passed and Jock’s calm inspection was repeated, a regular chorus of guffaws and remarks broke out. The long heavy bundles on their heads mad
e turning round a slow process, so that, except for the first half dozen, they were content to enjoy what they saw in front and to know by the laughter from behind that the joke had been repeated all down the line.
The last one walked calmly by; but as he did so there came one short muffled bark, ‘Whoop!’ from Jock as he sprang out and nipped the unsuspecting Shangaan behind. The boy let out a yell that made the whole gang jump and clutch wildly at their toppling bundles, and Jock raced along the footpath, leaping, gurgling and snapping behind each one he came near, scattering them this way and that, in a romp of wild enjoyment. The shouts of the scared boys, the clatter of the tins as their bundles toppled down, the scrambling and scratching as they clawed the ground pretending to pick up stones or sticks to stop his rushes and the ridiculous rout of the thirty Shangaans in every direction, abandoning their baggage and fleeing from the little red enemy only just visible in the grass as he hunted and harried them, were too much for my principles and far too much for my gravity. To be quite honest, I weakened badly, and from that day on preferred to look another way when Jock sallied out to inspect a gang of Shangaans. Between them Jim and Jock had beaten me.
But the weakening brought its own punishment and the joke was not far from making a tragedy. Many times while lying some way off in the shade of a tree or under another waggon I heard Jim, all unconscious of my presence, call in a low deep voice, almost a whisper, ‘Jock; Jock: kaffirs; Shangaans!’ Jock’s head was up in a moment and a romp of some sort followed unless I intervened. Afterwards, when Jock was deaf, Jim used to reach out and pull his foot or throw a handful of sand or a bunch of grass to rouse him, and when Jock’s head switched up Jim’s big black fist pointing to their common enemy was quite enough.
Jock of the Bushveld Page 17
