by Grant Allen
When the king goes over, the people soon follow him.
Langalula said, ‘I am convinced; baptize me.’
But the ways of white men, are they not incomprehensible? Though the Missionary had been preaching that very thing for months, yet when Langalula gave in he answered, ‘Conviction alone is not enough. You must wait a while till I feel that your life shows forth works meet for repentance.’ Langalula grumbled. He was little accustomed to such contradiction. But he knew it was hard arguing with these priestly white men, who will baptize a starving slave every bit as soon as a great chief; so he held his peace, and, though he chafed at it, waited the Missionary’s pleasure.
By and by, one day, the Missionary came to him. ‘Langalula,’ he said condescendingly, ‘I have watched you close for many weeks now, and I think I can baptize you.’
‘Then all my sins will be forgiven?’ asked Langalula.
‘All your sins will be forgiven,’ the Missionary answered.
‘But I must put away my wives?’ Langalula asked once more.
‘All save one,’ answered the Missionary. It was a point of doctrine, or at least of discipline.
‘Then I think,’ Langalula said, ‘I will wait for a week — so as to make up my mind which one of them is dearest to me.’
But he said this deceitfully, knowing in his own heart that all his sins were going to be forgiven, and determining in the interval to marry another wife, whom he would keep as his companion when he put away the others. For there was a young girl coming on, black but comely, the daughter of Khamsua, a neighbouring chief, whom Langalula had seen, and whom he wished to purchase. And since the last love is always (for the moment) the greatest, the chief cared very little whether he must put away all his other wives or not, if only he could keep Malali. She had driven out the rest of them. He had watched the girl growing up at Khamsua’s for years, and had said to himself always, ‘Whenever Malali is of marriageable age, see if I do not buy her and marry her.’
In pursuance of this plan, as soon as the Missionary was gone, Langalula rose up, and took the fighting men of his tribe with him (that there might be no dispute), and marched into the country of Malali’s father, whose name, as I said, was Khamsua. When Khamsua heard Langalula was on his way to his land with five thousand assegais, not to speak of Winchester rifles, he went out to meet him with a great retinue.
Khamsua cringed. Langalula said to him, ‘I am come to ask for Malali.’
The moment Khamsua heard that saying, he was unspeakably terrified, and flung himself down on his face, and clasped Langalula’s knees. For Khamsua was only a small chief in the country compared with Langalula.
‘O my king,’ Khamsua said, ‘O lion of the people, how could I know so great a monarch as you had set his eyes on Malali? and before you asked — woe, woe! — Montelo’s people came, and offered oxen on Montelo’s behalf for Malali. And I sold her to them, because I was afraid of Montelo, and could not have believed so great a chief as you had ever looked upon her.’
Langalula smiled at that. ‘Oh, as for Montelo,’ he said, ‘I can easily take her from him; and then I can get the Missionary to marry us.’
Khamsua, however, answered like a fool. ‘It cannot be. The Christians are so strait-laced. Montelo is a Christian now; he was baptized a week ago; and Malali was married to him in Christian fashion. Even if you were to kill Montelo and take her to your kraal, I don’t believe the Missionary would marry you.’
Langalula turned to his men. ‘Kill him,’ he said simply. And they killed him with an assegai.
As soon as that was finished, Langalula marched on into Montelo’s country. When he arrived there, Montelo crept out to meet him and tried to parley with him. But Langalula would not parley with the man who had deprived him of Malali. ‘We will fight for it,’ he said angrily. And they fought for it, then and there. The upshot of it all was that Langalula’s men conquered in the battle, and drove Montelo’s men (who had no Winchesters) back to their king’s kraal; and then they killed Montelo himself, and carried his head on an assegai.
By the very same evening they occupied the kraal that had once been Montelo’s, and Langalula’s men brought out Malali to their own leader. Langalula looked hard at her. She was a glossy-black girl, very smooth-skinned and lithe, and clean of limb. The great chief stared long at her. Malali hung her head and drooped her arms before him. ‘Why did you go with Montelo,’ he asked at last, ‘when Langalula would have taken you?’
The girl trembled with fear. ’Twas no fault of hers. How could she help it? A woman, there, is no free agent. ‘My father sold me,’ she answered, whimpering; ‘Montelo paid him a great many oxen. I had no choice but to go. O King, O mighty lion, I did not know you wanted me.’
With that she flung herself at his feet in terror, and held his knees, imploring him.
‘Take her to the hut that was once Montelo’s,’ said the great chief, smiling; ‘I will follow her there.’
They seized her arms and dragged her to the hut, crying and shrieking as she went. They dragged her roughly. Langalula remained behind, superintending the slaughter of Montelo’s warriors. As soon as he was tired he returned to the hut that had once been Montelo’s; for he wished to see Malali, whether she was really as beautiful as he believed, even though the Missionary would never marry him to her.
Malali, when she saw him, outside the hut, thought all was well, and that Langalula loved her. So she left off crying, and tried every art a woman knows to please and charm him. But Langalula was a very great king, and his anger was aroused. A king’s anger is terrible. He smiled to himself to see with what simple tricks the woman thought she could appease a mighty warrior.
‘Go into my hut!’ he said. And he followed her.
The next morning came, and the great king cried to himself with annoyance and vexation that Montelo and Khamsua — and the Missionary as well — should have done him, between them, out of so beautiful a woman. If the Missionary had been a black man, Langalula would have compelled him to baptize him outright, and then to marry him properly to Malali, with book and ring, in the Christian fashion. But he knew by experience it is no use threatening these white men with tortures; for, threaten how you may, they will not obey you; and, besides, the Governor would send up troops from Cape Town; and ’tis ill fighting with the men of the Governor. So he arose from his bed in the morning in a white heat of passion. ‘Malali,’ he said, gazing at her with an ugly smile, ‘I like you better than any woman I ever yet saw. You please me in everything. But you went off with Montelo, and the Missionary will not marry me to you now I have speared him. I have also speared your father, Khamsua, because he sold you for oxen to Montelo. I want a real queen, who shall be married to me white-fashion. I am becoming a Christian now, and can have only one wife. But it must not be you, because you were sold to Montelo, whom I have slain in the battle, and they will not marry us. So I will keep my own first wife, the earliest married, though she is old and lean, and discard the other ones. Come out of the hut, Malali, and stand in front of my warriors.’
Malali was afraid at that, and would have skulked in the corner if she dared; but she dared not, because she was frightened of Langalula. So out she came as he bid her, trembling in all her limbs, and crouching with terror; her knees hardly bore her. Langalula turned to his men; he looked at her with regret. She was sleek and beautiful.
‘Pin her through the body to the ground with an assegai,’ he said, pointing at her.
And they pinned her through with an assegai.
‘Pin her arms and her legs,’ said the great chief.
And his followers pinned them. The woman fainted.
‘Now leave her to die in the sun,’ said Langalula.
So they left her to die there.
After that, Langalula marched back grimly with his men to his own country. As soon as he reached his kraal he went to see the Missionary. He was very submissive.
‘I repent of all my sins,’ he said. ‘I have come t
o be baptized. Teacher, I will put away all my wives save one; and even for that one I will retain the earliest.’
And that is how Langalula became a Christian.
THE CURATE OF CHURNSIDE
Walter Dene, deacon, in his faultless Oxford clerical coat and broad felt hat, strolled along slowly, sunning himself as he went, after his wont, down the pretty central lane of West Churnside. It was just the idyllic village best suited to the taste of such an idyllic young curate as Walter Dene. There were cottages with low-thatched roofs, thickly overgrown with yellow stonecrop and pink house-leek; there were trellis-work porches up which the scented dog-rose and the fainter honeysuckle clambered together in sisterly rivalry; there were pargeted gable-ends of Elizabethan farmhouses, quaintly varied with black oak joists and moulded plaster panels. At the end of all, between an avenue of ancient elm-trees, the heavy square tower of the old church closed in the little vista — a church with a round Norman doorway and dog-tooth arches, melting into Early English lancets in the aisle, and finishing up with a great decorated east window by the broken cross and yew-tree. Not a trace of Perpendicularity about it anywhere, thank goodness: ‘for if it were Perpendicular,’ said Walter Dene to himself often, ‘I really think, in spite of my uncle, I should have to look out for another curacy.’
Yes, it was a charming village, and a charming country; but, above all, it was rendered habitable and pleasurable for a man of taste by the informing presence of Christina Eliot. ‘I don’t think I shall propose to Christina this week after all,’ thought Walter Dene as he strolled along lazily. ‘The most delightful part of love-making is certainly its first beginning. The little tremor of hope and expectation; the half-needless doubt you feel as to whether she really loves you; the pains you take to pierce the thin veil of maidenly reserve; the triumph of detecting her at a blush or a flutter when she sees you coming — all these are delicate little morsels to be rolled daintily on the critical palate, and not to be swallowed down coarsely at one vulgar gulp. Poor child, she is on tenter-hooks of hesitation and expectancy all the time, I know; for I’m sure she loves me now, I’m sure she loves me; but I must wait a week yet: she will be grateful to me for it hereafter. We mustn’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs; we mustn’t eat up all our capital at one extravagant feast, and then lament the want of our interest ever afterward. Let us live another week in our first fool’s paradise before we enter on the safer but less tremulous pleasures of sure possession. We can enjoy first love but once in a lifetime; let us enjoy it now while we can, and not fling away the chance prematurely by mere childish haste and girlish precipitancy.’ Thinking which thing, Walter Dene halted a moment by the churchyard wall, picked a long spray of scented wild thyme from a mossy cranny, and gazed into the blue sky above at the graceful swifts who nested in the old tower, as they curved and circled through the yielding air on their evenly poised and powerful pinions.
Just at that moment old Mary Long came out of her cottage to speak with the young parson. ‘If ye plaze, Maister Dene,’ she said in her native west-country dialect, ‘our Nully would like to zee ‘ee. She’s main ill to-day, zur, and she be like to die a’most, I’m thinking.’
‘Poor child, poor child,’ said Walter Dene tenderly. ‘She’s a dear little thing, Mrs. Long, is your Nellie, and I hope she may yet be spared to you. I’ll come and see her at once, and try if I can do anything to ease her.’
He crossed the road compassionately with the tottering old grandmother, giving her his helping hand over the kerbstone, and following her with bated breath into the close little sickroom. Then he flung open the tiny casement with its diamond-leaded panes, so as to let in the fresh summer air, and picked a few sprigs of sweetbriar from the porch, which he joined with the geranium from his own button-hole to make a tiny nosegay for the bare bedside. After that, he sat and talked awhile gently in an undertone to pale, pretty little Nellie herself, and went away at last promising to send her some jelly and some soup immediately from the vicarage kitchen.
‘She’s a sweet little child,’ he said to himself musingly, ‘though I’m afraid she’s not long for this world now; and the poor like these small attentions dearly. They get them seldom, and value them for the sake of the thoughtfulness they imply, rather than for the sake of the mere things themselves. I can order a bottle of calf’s-foot at the grocer’s, and Carter can set it in a mould without any trouble; while as for the soup, some tinned mock turtle and a little fresh stock makes a really capital mixture for this sort of thing. It costs so little to give these poor souls pleasure, and it is a great luxury to oneself undeniably. But, after all, what a funny trade it is to set an educated man to do! They send us up to Oxford or Cambridge, give us a distinct taste for Aeschylus and Catullus, Dante and Milton, Mendelssohn and Chopin, good claret and olives farcies, and then bring us down to a country village, to look after the bodily and spiritual ailments of rheumatic old washer-women! If it were not for poetry, flowers, and Christina, I really think I should succumb entirely under the infliction.’
‘He’s a dear, good man, that he is, is young passon,’ murmured old Mary Long as Walter disappeared between the elm-trees; ‘and he do love the poor and the zick, the same as if he was their own brother. God bless his zoul, the dear, good vulla, vor all his kindness to our Nully.’
Halfway down the main lane Walter came across Christina Eliot. As she saw him she smiled and coloured a little, and held out her small gloved hand prettily. Walter took it with a certain courtly and graceful chivalry. ‘An exquisite day, Miss Eliot,’ he said; ‘such a depth of sapphire in the sky, such a faint undertone of green on the clouds by the horizon, such a lovely humming of bees over the flickering hot meadows! On days like this, one feels that Schopenhauer is wrong after all, and that life is sometimes really worth living.’
‘It seems to me often worth living,’ Christina answered; ‘if not for oneself, at least for others. But you pretend to be more of a pessimist than you really are, I fancy, Mr. Dene. Any one who finds so much beauty in the world as you do can hardly think life poor or meagre. You seem to catch the loveliest points in everything you look at, and to throw a little literary or artistic reflection over them which makes them even lovelier than they are in themselves.’
‘Well, no doubt one can increase one’s possibilities of enjoyment by carefully cultivating one’s own faculties of admiration and appreciation,’ said the curate thoughtfully; ‘but, after all, life has only a few chapters that are thoroughly interesting and enthralling in all its history. We oughtn’t to hurry over them too lightly, Miss Eliot; we ought to linger on them lovingly, and make the most of their potentialities; we ought to dwell upon them like “linkèd sweetness long drawn out.” It is the mistake of the world at large to hurry too rapidly over the pleasantest episodes, just as children pick all the plums at once out of the pudding. I often think that, from the purely selfish and temporal point of view, the real value of a life to its subject may be measured by the space of time over which he has managed to spread the enjoyment of its greatest pleasures. Look, for example, at poetry, now.’
A faint shade of disappointment passed across Christina’s face as he turned from what seemed another groove into that indifferent subject; but she answered at once, ‘Yes, of course one feels that with the higher pleasures at least; but there are others in which the interest of plot is greater, and then one looks naturally rather to the end. When you begin a good novel, you can’t help hurrying through it in order to find out what becomes of everybody at last.’
‘Ah, but the highest artistic interest goes beyond mere plot interest. I like rather to read for the pleasure of reading, and to loiter over the passages that please me, quite irrespective of what goes before or what comes after; just as you, for your part, like to sketch a beautiful scene for its own worth to you, irrespective of what may happen to the leaves in autumn, or to the cottage roof in twenty years from this. By the way, have you finished that little water-colour of the mill yet? It’s the pre
ttiest thing of yours I’ve ever seen, and I want to look how you’ve managed the light on your foreground.’
‘Come in and see it,’ said Christina. ‘It’s finished now, and, to tell you the truth, I’m very well pleased with it myself.’
‘Then I know it must be good,’ the curate answered; ‘for you are always your own harshest critic.’ And he turned in at the little gate with her, and entered the village doctor’s tiny drawing-room.
Christina placed the sketch on an easel near the window — a low window opening to the ground, with long lithe festoons of faint-scented jasmine encroaching on it from outside — and let the light fall on it aslant in the right direction. It was a pretty and a clever sketch certainly, with more than a mere amateur’s sense of form and colour; and Walter Dene, who had a true eye for pictures, could conscientiously praise it for its artistic depth and fulness. Indeed, on that head at least, Walter Dene’s veracity was unimpeachable, however lax in other matters; nothing on earth would have induced him to praise as good a picture or a sculpture in which he saw no real merit. He sat a little while criticising and discussing it, suggesting an improvement here or an alteration there, and then he rose hurriedly, remembering all at once his forgotten promise to little Nellie. ‘Dear me,’ he said, ‘your daughter’s picture has almost made me overlook my proper duties, Mrs. Eliot. I promised to send some jelly and things at once to poor little Nellie Long at her grandmother’s. How very wrong of me to let my natural inclinations keep me loitering here, when I ought to have been thinking of the poor of my parish!’ And he went out with just a gentle pressure on Christina’s hand, and a look from his eyes that her heart knew how to read aright at the first glance of it.
‘Do you know, Christie,’ said her father, ‘I sometimes fancy when I hear that new parson fellow talk about his artistic feelings, and so on, that he’s just a trifle selfish, or at least self-centred. He always dwells so much on his own enjoyment of things, you know.’
