by Bowen, Peter
I rested up for a couple of days and ate as well as Durban could offer—the fresh fish and the oysters was best—and didn’t do much else. My wound was healing nicely and I have long found that staying in bed with something like that will make you weak and the wound heal very slowly. You got to get up and walk.
The fourth night there was a knock at my door and a young officer in the fanciest rig I had ever seen on a man was standing there. He dripped with gold braid over white, with all sorts of green piping, said he was Lieutenant Wilson—this with me blinking at him because the glare was so blinding—and would I do the Governor the honor of attending tea tomorrow. The Governor was most anxious to hear my accounts and I had been mentioned favorably in dispatches. (I figure it is a favorable mention if they don’t say “Please hang or shoot immediately.”)
“Of course,” says I.
“You are Adendorff?”
“Yup.”
“Hmmmmmm. I thought you’d be Dutch.”
“Canadian,” says I. At which point he got an expression like there was something nasty in the way of smell in the air and stumped off.
Tea the next day was one of the strangest experiences I had ever had. There was a few officers—mostly Navy—a lot of florid-looking civilians, and their ladies crammed into silk dresses with tulle wraps and reeking of some muskrat scent—and we all passed in a line, where we bowed and curtsied, depending. I thought of curtsying but thought it might just confirm the Lieutenant’s suspicions about Canadians. He was standing by the Governor—Sir Bartle Frere—and his wife, looking at me as though I might steal the Governor’s gold buttons.
Frere was as bored as I was with all of this. He ho-hoed for a while, and made the rounds, and then made a nod in the direction of a double door guarded by our Lieutenant Wilson. We slipped in there. It was a conservatory, with a piano. We sat on the bench and Frere fiddled at a cabinet and brought up a couple of stiff drinks.
“How’s the governing business?” says I.
“Beats the law all down,” says Frere. “I have good reports from Buller and Chelmsford upon you, Mr. Adendorff. There is much talk about the disaster at Isandhlwana. Chelmsford was not in the camp—blameless, of course—and there are few accounts that make sense. I thought you might tell me what you saw.”
I told him as well as I could, and bluntly that the whole and only reason that it happened was that Durnford had put his troops in the wrong places. I told him about what I saw of Rorke’s Drift and of what I had seen of Cetshwayo. And then of Hlobane. That was a happy accident for the Zulus—they had come on us at the only good time for them. One half hour more or less and we would have just rode away. It couldn’t be called a surprise attack. They just trotted over the hill and there we were on the damn mountain.
I suppose I talked for half an hour. Frere took no exception to anything I said, just nodded from time to time. I finished.
“I have a delicate matter I should like to discuss with you,” he said when I was through. “Extremely delicate. There is a young woman who ... ah ... cared deeply for Durnford. And he for her. Poor Durnford married early, and there was a scandal, and a divorce, and the court awarded custody of their two sons to Durnford. What with this damned morality, there was nothing that they could do until Durnford’s first wife died. Which she has not.”
“Obstinate, ain’t she?” says I.
Frere snorted. “I beg you when you speak with the young lady to spare her such levity, Mr. Adendorff. She is an intelligent young woman of great gifts. She would like to speak with you about Isandhlwana. It is something of an obsession with her.”
“So I say he fought like a lion and was last seen rallying one sergeant and two men for a death-or-glory charge. Fine,” says I.
“She is not stupid,” says Frere. “She is obsessed with transferring the blame from poor Durnford to Chelmsford. It would be helpful to her if you could speak quite frankly, without the addition of your—succinct assessments.”
“The blame would have to be shared by both Pulleine and Durnford,” says I. “Chelmsford had left the camp with a sufficient force. It was those two idiots who threw away the time needed to prepare to meet the Zulus. That’s all there is to it.”
Frere shrugged and led me back into the reception hall.
There was a beautiful, slender, young woman near the door. She was dressed fashionably, so I liked her—my watered-silk waistcoat wasn’t exactly the hit of the party. She had too-bright blue eyes—from crying, I expected—and she wore no jewelry or wraps.
“Mr. Adendorff, this is Miss Harriet Colenso,” says Frere.
I bowed. Hell, I come from a good home.
We chatted, the three of us, about nothing much. Then Frere wearily went back to his pumphandle work, smiling grandly.
Miss Colenso asked me kindly—she had a deep voice for such a slender, small woman—how I liked Durban. There was no gushing or hysteria. She said her father, the Bishop of Natal, would like to meet me. Could I come to dinner tonight?
I accepted, and left gratefully.
42
ALL OF THE GOOD horses in Durban had gone off to war. There was a kind of fever in South Africa which infested certain grazing areas and the imported stock took a few bites of grass, swayed, and fell over dead about nine-tenths of the time, so the local “salted” horses was selling for unbelievable prices. The cabby told me this as we lurched along behind the two sorriest lumps of dog meat I have ever seen.
I got to the Colensos’ a bit late, hat in hand. Walking would have been quicker, but I wasn’t sure where they lived. The house was a big old pile built some years before, and a lot out of plumb. There was a votive candle in the window. The black maid who answered the door motioned me in. I was willing to bet that I was the only dinner guest.
The family was seated in the parlor, singing hymns to the wheezing of a pump organ. Well, hell, what do you expect in a Bishop’s home? The last strains of one of them songs died away and the bishop put down his hymnal and come to greet me. He waved away my apologies and shook my hand heartily. He was a tall, heavy man, with shrewd eyes behind bifocals, and the sort of lines that trouble and kindness put in the forehead.
I was introduced to his wife, named Frances, and a daughter, named Frances, too, and we chatted amiably about nothing much until the same black maid took us in to dinner.
The dinner was awful, as only the English can make food. I have eaten with Apaches, Plains tribes, and Eskimos, lived on jerky and what greens were around for weeks at a time, but this was a meal only the English could have done. Roast beef from a cow must have been about forty, some sort of mashed roots might have been potatoes when they was younger, and vegetables boiled so long they looked like them glassy noodles you get in Japan. We drank water with a dab of some wine in it. I chewed away and tried to swallow. All the Colensos had real strong jawlines.
That ordeal over, I was hauled off to the parlor again and given a cup of good tea, and then Harriet commenced into drilling me, with her family sort of standing by ready to pounce on anything she missed.
I performed rather well, describing the battle, and what I had seen of the beginning of the end, and remained noncommittal on who could possibly be to blame. When I was asked questions I didn’t want to answer, I said I was only a sergeant of volunteers and hardly privy to staff conferences. Besides, I had been out on patrol, and when I had seen the huge imPi in the donga and ridden back to warn the camp everything seemed normal. (Durnford, of course, proceeded to make every available wrong decision. He was as big a genius as Custer at doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.)
Harriet kept at me, and I kept being noncommittal, and she finally stormed off, I supposed to cry. There was an awkward silence, one of those that make you remember you have an appointment, and when I rose and stammered something the Bishop took the cue and he offered to drive me back to town himself. The coach was all made up, so I suspected the old geezer had known right along what was going to happen. We took off, and he didn’t say anything until
we got back to my hotel.
“Mr. Adendorff,” he said, “I appreciate your kindness to my daughter. She is distraught.” He shook my hand and wished me godspeed and drove off. There wasn’t much more to say.
I had a couple of shots of grog in the hotel’s bar.
Durban had several newspapers, and I idly looked at one. I finally saw an ad for an appearance at the Stage Theatre by, of all people, my friend the actress Gussie Walker, and I thought, I haven’t seen anyone who knows me for months. Then I thought that that was why I was here. Then I thought that George Hanks was no doubt hanging around the mess tents up north and getting kicked around. So I called the same cabby with the same two pieces of dog-meat-at-your-service and found the theatre. I sent in a note by the guard at the stage door and in a few minutes Gussie herself came out and said she was delighted to see me, Mr. Adendorff—I’d said my own name, of course, in the note, and that I was traveling incognito, as it were. Gussie, when stage pickings are slim or she’s tired of the life, does bunco games and picks the occasional pocket, and so I had no trouble there. Always stick to good honest business people, if you can.
She was staying at my hotel, and we just hadn’t seen each other.
It took her an hour or so to scrape off the layer of paint she’d put on for the evening’s murder of Shakespeare and scrape on another, which was her everyday wear, and we took the cab back to the hotel. The little bastard at the desk glanced up once and then went back to his dirty postcards—actresses and Americans will be that way you know. We had oysters and an incredibly good South African champagne and then Gussie sighed and took my hand and said what she always says when she sees me.
“It’s so good to see you, Luther. I don’t know why. I don’t ever miss you until you’re here. Why are you here? Being a hero? You have saved beautiful maidens from ravishing, out of the noble impulse to be first. You have dashed to warn the stagecoach of approaching savages, and made off with the strongbox while the poor fools are looking to their ammunition. You have carried messages hundreds of miles in below zero weather, sleeping under the snow, because that was safer than staying in the fort while the wind piles snow up the stockade walls for the Indians to climb up. You are a dear, Luther.”
“Good to see you, too, Gussie,” says I. “And what happened to that rich racehorse owner you was gonna marry?”
“Sleeping with the vice-president of his bank was a small price to pay for knowing he wasn’t as rich as he said.”
We liked and understood each other.
“What’s the news from home?” says I.
“Ain’t been there in a year,” says Gussie. “I have been spouting Shakespeare to boobs in Australia, and anyway even Cape Town beats Sydney all to hell.”
“Figure you can head back to the States pretty soon?”
“Another year. I am saving for my trousseau.”
“Saratoga Springs?”
“Yesssssss,” says Gussie dreamily, “where I’ll meet some rich old fool with a lot of money and a bad heart. With good luck and my best efforts, he’ll die on the wedding night.”
After a while we crawled into bed and fucked like minks, and had the best old time.
“Luther,” she says, “what are these black women like?”
“A nigger wench is like any other,” says I. “I sort of like them because when they talk I don’t know what they’re saying.”
She pinched my ear for that one. We went at it again.
Gussie slipped out sometime in the night. I saw her at breakfast in the morning. Just to confound everyone we ignored each other.
Later I learned that the English always do that.
43
I WASN’T EXACTLY BOILING WITH eagerness to get back to the war, so I limped as convincingly as I could until Gussie set sail for an engagement in Rio de Janeiro, which place she assured me had a large population of Englishmen hungry for Shakespeare.
“Well,” I says at the dockside, “I hope they don’t like Shakespeare too much. One of ’em might ... oh never mind. ...”
“Go to hell, Luther,” said Gussie, flouncing up the gangplank.
I searched around for two more days and found two salted horses at an outrageous price. Didn’t seem outrageous to me, what with the war on and how bad I might need ’em, and I got two nice new repeating Winchesters and a pair of Colt’s finest and a thousand rounds of ammunition for ’em. That episode with the cylinder falling out my fine British piece had soured me on English firearms. I also bought one of them leaded snakewhips and a few luxuries.
So off I went toward the second act of my Zulu War, which I hoped would be nice and uneventful and dull. Hell I did. I was bored witless, in all the meanings of the word. I kept thinking about Marieke, which made me mad.
During my slow and painful recuperation there had been two more battles, one at Kambula, on the west, and one at Gingindhlovu on the eastern track closest to the sea. The Zulus had been defeated with heavy losses and now Chelmsford was grinding up the center track to Ulundi and the end of the war, we all hoped.
So off I went on a sunny morning, riding one good horse and leading another, birds singing their fool heads off, grass smelling all nice, warm, not a care in the world, heading north and west at an unhurried pace.
Now usually when I am feeling good it makes me very nervous. I was down on the Cimarron once feeling like I did now and all of a sudden Comanches was everywhere and my partner ended up being tortured to death. They stuck him full of pitchpine slivers and set him alight. Would have done the same to me by the next day, only Quanah Parker was bored with the local competition and needed somone to play chess with. By carefully allowing myself to be beaten after hard and prolonged—especially prolonged—matches, I kept alive for a week. We had also spent a lot of time jawjacking, and one thing about old Quanah is he had a hell of a sense of humor. So he had me tied backwards on a horse and sent off, which I didn’t mind one bit.
I had that good, full feeling this morning and I should have known better. But here I was one hell of a long ways from any Zulus, passing Boer farms and peaceful country, seeing stupid bunches of cattle, passing by the occasional postrider.
I come to ford a small river, went across, and struggled up the bank, which was muddy and slippery even with the corduroy underlay. Got remounted and headed for two close bunches of trees. Kayrist, I was even whistling. Terrible habit.
A loop of rope come out of the bushes and settled over me. Something spooked the horses, and there I was sitting on my ass in the dust, somewhat out of wind. I had the presence of mind to pull out my revolver.
A little figure in rough Boer country clothes stepped out, and she was pointing one of those rifles the Boers use for shooting rhinos and elephants and such at me. The bore on the damn thing looked like an open wellhead.
“You bastard,” said sweet Marieke. “You copper-bottomed redneck bastard. You son of a bitch. I am going to shoot you.”
I wanted to laugh, but I felt it would be real impolite.
Marieke went on in that vein—she was a poor cusser, but then she wasn’t but sixteen or so—all the while keeping the gun pointed at my head. Her Bushman chum was squatting in the shadows, grinning.
Marieke finally came over and gave me a few boots in the ribs, but she did loosen the rope and let me get up. I knocked the dust off with my hat while she went on with her limited vocabulary about what a disgrace I was to the human race, an opinion I heartily shared and would have raised my voice in the chorus but I somehow felt that it would not be the sort of thing she was looking for.
She walked around in front of me and looked up at me with her pretty face.
“I am going to marry you,” she says, “and I am letting you know right now that I am never again going to let you out of my sight so that you can go sleep with whores.” Then she slammed the butt of her elephant gun down on my left foot hard enough to have me hopping around and adding to the general din. When I stopped, the damn Bushman had fallen off the log and was
holding his sides.
This warn’t the sort of audience approval that Marieke had been looking for, so she stalked over and kicked him, in a listless sort of way. He jumped up and ran off. A Bushman can disappear like smoke.
We caught my horses and went over to where she had hers tethered. But Bushman reappeared, still grinning like he’d never had such a good morning in all his life.
“I’m going with you,” she says.
“I have to go back to the war,” I says.
“I’m going there with you,” she says.
“Look,” I says, “you’ll be noticed and sent right back to your family. Your father and brothers are up there.”
She spurred up her horse for an answer.
We rode north and west, keeping away from the little towns and roadhouses. When we stopped that night and made camp, I made about one attempt to talk her out of it and got cracked across my shins for my pains. All right, thinks I, this is pissing into the wind.
“I don’t have to go back right away,” I says. “Why don’t we just go off for a few days?”
“Of course we are going off for a few days,” says Marieke.
44
MARIEKE AND ME SPENT the next day walking around in what I suppose was circles, holding hands, sometimes sitting on rocks—Christ, I even picked her some flowers—and generally acting like the moonstruck idiots that we was. I loved her. She was a little spitfire—had to be, with them brothers—and she acted old sometimes and sometimes like a very young girl. She was her own.
I was waiting for questions about Gussie, and they never came. Oh, she ranted on now and again about all of the whores in Durban and such, and it came to me all of a sudden that she probably hadn’t even gone into the town.
“There ain’t no whores in Durban that I know of,” says I at one point, making it the purest seaport in all the world.
“All whores,” she snapped. Well, she had a point.
“You never even been there,” says I.
