The Claw.

by Cynthia Stockley.

CHAPTER ONE.

PART ONE--THE SKIES CALL.

"It works in me like madness, dear, To bid me say good-bye, For the seas call and the stars call, And oh! the call of the sky."

Hour after hour Zeederberg's post-cart and all that therein was straggled deviously across the landscape, b.u.mping along the rutty road, creaking and craking, swaggling from side to side behind the blocky hoofs of eight mules.

At five o'clock in the afternoon the heat was intense, but the sun lay in the west at last, and tiny flecks of cloud in the turquoise sky were transforming themselves into torn strips of golden fleece. The bare bleak kops of Bechua.n.a.land were softened by amethystine tints, and the gaunt bush took feathery outlines against the horizon.

The driver of the post-cart, a big yellow Cape boy with oystery eyes, took a long swig from a black bottle which he was ready to affirm contained cold tea, though the storekeepers who filled it at every stopping place referred to its contents variously as _dop_, Cape smoke, and greased lightning. Afterwards he lovingly bestowed the bottle under his seat, cracked his whip, and shouted in a ferocious voice:

_Hirrrrie-yoh doppers_!

I sat behind the driver, on the floor of the cart crammed amongst cushions and rugs and parcels and mail-bags and luggage, aching pa.s.sionately in every bone, deadly weary, and very cross. For when you are extremely tall it is not all rapture to sit for hour after hour with your length hunched beneath you like an idol of Buddha. And when you are thin, not bonily thin but temperamentally slender, you don't care for parcels b.u.mping into your curves as if you were made of wood, and mail-bags apparently stuffed with flints and jagged rocks piercing through the thickest cushions into your very marrow.

_Hirrrrie-yoh doppers!... Slaagte... Verdommeder skepsels_!...

Heaven knows what terrible significance was contained in these cabalistic words, but the eight mules immediately broke into a shambling run, the post-cart swaggled from side to side, the mail-bags. .h.i.t me and stabbed me, and clouds of fine dust arose, wrapping us round in a smothering fog. Five minutes later the mules resumed their usual slouch, the fog subsided into a feathery mist, and all was as before.

Slowly and deviously we straggled across the landscape. I tried for the hundredth time to arrange my rugs into the semblance of a nest, and for the hundredth time failed to do anything of the kind. There was no rest or comfort anywhere in that post-cart. In spite of my chiffon veil I could feel the fine road-dust powdering thickly on to my charming face.

Mosquitoes sped down silently from strongholds in the hooped tent of the cart and without even a warning serenade took long draughts of my nice young blood through the linen sleeves of my blouse. A hundred gra.s.s ticks having at various times of outspan made convenient entry through open-work brown silk stockings, chewed at my ankles causing exquisite irritation not to be a.s.suaged by a violent application of finger-nails.

The breeze, if heavy turgid ma.s.ses of air displaced by the movement of the cart might be so called, conveyed to my face the steam arising from the mules and the extraordinarily pungent odour of native that emanated from the driver. It was something to be thankful for that the latter was so busy with the mules and his black bottle that he did not often turn his big _cafe-au-lait_-coloured countenance to me, for when he did there was something so revolting in the spirituous odour of his breath and the expression of his oystery eyes that I could feel my scalp stirring as though my hair had suddenly been brushed the wrong way. At such moments I was extremely glad that I had a small but business-like Colt slung conspicuously from my waist-belt, and that in the boudoir of a little old hunting-box in Meath there were to be found three rather nice silver cups (probably all filled with late roses) awarded to me by various ladies' shooting clubs for making the highest aggregate of bulls-eyes. It was at such moments too that, good shot or not, I realised that I had been utterly foolish and reckless to adventure forth alone and unprotected upon this wild journey into Mashonaland.

At six o'clock the heat was still intense, and the western sky resembled a vast frameless picture daubed in primitive colours, slashed and gashed with reds and yellows. An hour later the sun shot past the horizon like a red-hot cannon-ball aimed at the other side of the world, and for a short time the land was suffused in wilder lights of orange, and the skies seemed streaked with blood. Then suddenly the heat was over, the flare died out of the picture, the far-off kops turned a faint pink colour, and the grimness of the bush was blurred in a drapery of purple chiffon. At once night unsheathed her velvet wings, and darkness fell in dim purple veils embroidered with silver stars. Some subtle scent as of flowering trees growing by a river blew through the tent of the cart.

The world seemed filled with gracious dimness and made up of illimitable lovely s.p.a.ce. An indescribable feeling of happy freedom filled my heart. It seemed to me that the lungs of my soul drew breath and expanded as they had never done in any land before. It was a sensation that came to me every morning when I saw the sun turn a gaunt country into a blue and golden world; and every evening when the sun fell and the land was wrapt in purple and silver vestments. It seemed to me then to be possible to disregard the discomforts of the day, and to forget what terrors the night might hold, by just succ.u.mbing to the charm and the magic of this wonderful great empty land. I was content to be in Africa!

Leaning back, my head against a mail-bag, my eyes half closed, I found myself suddenly remembering a brown-faced man with vivid blue eyes, with whom I had once danced at the Viceregal Lodge on the night of my "coming-out," and who had talked to me about the lure of Africa, saying that it was worse than the call of the East. He had spoken of Africa as _she_, and with a mingled hatred and love that conjured up to my mind a vision of some false, beautiful vampire, who dragged men to her and fastened her claws into their hearts for ever.

"It's a brute of a country!" he said. "Quite unfit to live in. Thank G.o.d to be back to civilisation again." But a moment later he was talking of the veldt as tenderly as a lover might talk of the woman he loves. I remembered being intensely interested and fascinated at the time, but it was in the middle of my first real ball, and it was also my eighteenth birthday and the occasion of my first serious proposal, and I had had, very naturally, a great many other absorbing things to think about. Moreover, the dance with the blue-eyed man had come to an end, I had been whirled off by some one else, and had never seen him again.

Such blue burning eyes, set in such a dark burnt face! What added more strangely to his vivid appearance were two tiny blue points of turquoise stuck in his ears.

"Shades of George Washington!" I said to myself. "Can the man be an Indian--or a Hindoo?" But who ever heard of an Indian or a Hindoo having blue eyes? Just as I was going to ask him, in the frank way that always seemed to me to be the best and simplest method of getting to the heart of things, why he wore them, I found him looking with such a deep, strange glance at me, that, most unaccountably, my lids fell over my eyes as though weighted with little heavy stones, and for a few moments I could not lift them again. Also, my gift for airy conversation suddenly deserted me and I became tongue-tied. I remember feeling glad that I was so charming to look at or he might have thought me a fool.

For I had not a word to say; I could only listen eagerly to him talking about Africa like a lover. At least I felt that was the way I should like my lover to speak of me. Perhaps it was because Herriott could not talk like that that I refused him that night, though I had always intended to take him, and I knew I should vex both my people and his by not fulfilling what had been almost an accepted situation for months past.

But that was all long past--three years past to be accurate--and I had never again seen the man who talked of Africa, though I had often glanced round ball-rooms and theatres for that dark face with the burning eyes and the ridiculous blue turquoise ear-rings. Many strange things had happened since then to swallow up the memory of him, and it _had_ been swallowed. But it was strange how often I had remembered him again since I set out on this journey to Mashonaland, and pa.s.sing strange that though I had only been in Africa for a month and known the veldt for only eleven days I seemed to understand all he had said about it.

Why did I understand? I wondered. Was the lure of Africa on me too?

Was this strange brown land of golden days, and crimson and orange eventides, and purple nights, calling to me? Would it keep me as he had said it always kept people who felt the lure and heard the call? At the thought I trembled a little, and felt afraid of I knew not what.

Afterwards I laughed to myself at the absurdity of the thought. How could Africa keep me? I belonged to the civilised cities of the world.

My home was in Paris, London, Dublin, sometimes New York. I had lived always amongst pictures, and sculpture, and books, beautiful music, lovely clothes, jewels. All these things were necessary to me. I could not contemplate life without them. Africa was only an interlude--an experience. In a few months I should be back again hunting with the Meath pack from our dear little box near Balbriggan; flying over to London for b.a.l.l.s and Hurlingham, or with my pretty Aunt Betty van Alen in her Paris studio, entertaining her and her friends with the strange tale of my adventures in this strange land. How ridiculous to fancy that I could feel the thrilling pain of a claw in my heart--Africa's claw! What was Africa to me or I to Africa?

I shivered. There were mists rising everywhere now, and joining the clouds of dust they wove gauzy scarfs about us and white things moved before us on the road, like spectres showing the way.

The sunshine that I loved so much was gone! It was my pa.s.sion for sunshine and blue skies that had brought me for a time to this barbaric land. My pa.s.sion for sunshine that I had never really been able to indulge to the full, until the crushing failure of a great bank in America had transformed me from an heiress into just an ordinary girl with a few hundreds a year whom the world no longer concerned itself particularly about.

That was one of the strange events that had occurred to change my life and swallow up many vivid memories. First my lovely and much loved mother, the one parent I could remember, had died, pa.s.sing away softly in her sleep one night and looking so happy--almost gay--as she lay there dead, that it had seemed wrong to regret what had happened and the blow had thus been robbed of half its terror and pain. Then, directly afterwards, had come the banking disaster, sweeping away the great fortune my mother had left and leaving nothing from the wreckage but a few thousands to be divided between my brother d.i.c.k and me. That had been the end of my fashionable career, and when I realised it I rejoiced with an exceeding great joy, for it was a life that, as the French put it, had "never said anything to me." Immediately the future had become far more interesting. Hundreds of people whom I had never cared a b.u.t.ton about, but whom I had been obliged to meet and smile with, "and gladly endure," dropped instantly out of my life and I never saw them again. The horizon became a blank canvas that I might fill in with any figures I liked against any background I chose. Well! the background I chose was sunshine, which I sought in many out-of-the-way places where sunshine abounds, and the people I let into my picture were all the odd, charming creatures I met in my travels and the delightful writers and painters and sculptors who made up the world of my Aunt Betty van Alen, herself a gifted sculptress and a beautiful Bohemian soul. She had been appointed my guardian by my mother, and we spent most of our time together, only, a true American, she never could be drawn very far from her beloved Paris. However, she was American in this, too, that she considered the world as free to women as to men, and that no harm could come to a self-reliant girl who had been well brought up and taught black from white. So that when she could not be with me herself she suffered no qualms in letting me go off on my excursions alone, and was perfectly satisfied that I should never come to any harm. She was of opinion that every true-born American girl has her head so well balanced and such a fine sense of beauty and the fitness of things that she could never step from the paths of wisdom, or stray from that straight white road that her religion and early training had laid down for her; that the more you trust an American girl the more she is trustworthy. And I think she was right. But what she never took into account with me was that though my mother was American and I had been born under the Stars and Stripes, my father's half of me was Irish, and Irish drops in the blood spell love of adventure, love of the extraordinary in people and places and things, love of beauty, and lots of other loves, that not only cause one exquisite pleasure that is more than half pain, but lead one into many strange places where convention is not. However, I never told her or any one else of these things. Indeed it was only dimly that I realised them for myself.

On this visit to Africa, so very far away from her, Betty had unexpectedly held out rather firmly about the necessity of a chaperon, and to please her I had travelled out with a frumpy old German governess we had both known many years, who was visiting Africa to see about some property an uncle had left her in the Transvaal. All the way out I had made it quite plain to Madame von Stohl that I meant to go up to Mashonaland and see my brother d.i.c.k, that in fact it was one of my chief reasons for coming to Africa at all; and she never said a word against the idea. But lo! after I had trailed around with her to all sorts of uninteresting places in Cape Colony and the Transvaal she calmly and firmly refused to fulfil _her_ part of the programme and go with me to Mashonaland. She said she was afraid of being eaten by Lobengula, the King of the Matabele.

The only thing to do, then, was to make my own plans and enquiries.

Every one told me it was a journey of the very roughest and wildest description, and that very few women had done it before. It appeared that there were already a great number of women in Mashonaland, but they had all travelled up by waggon, with their men-folks to look after them, taking about three months to accomplish the journey. Instead of this information daunting me, as it was evidently meant to do, it made me only the more eager for such an adventure. Therefore, when I heard one man remarking to another (through the open window of the Johannesburg Hotel where we were staying) that if I took that coach journey alone it would take the curl out of my hair, I merely felt sorry for the man:-- first, because he never would and never could know that my hair curled naturally, and secondly, that he should have so poor an opinion of an Irish-American girl as to think that a few rough adventures would scare her from a plan on which she had set her heart. In any case it was really no business of his. But Africa is chock full of people who mind your business for you as well as large quant.i.ties of their own. At first I was amazed and indignant at the number of utter strangers who came along and tried to interfere with my contemplated journey. Later I learned to listen, in the same spirit as it was given, to advice that was not really meant for anything but friendly information and a touching interest in the mistakes of other people. And when I smiled at them and told them that I loved adventures and couldn't get enough of them, the men gazed at me with admiration, mingled (they told me) with a longing to start for Mashonaland by the same coach, and the women looked wistful but denied their longing to follow my example.

As for Madame von Stohl, she refused to budge from her comfortable quarters in the Johannesburg hotel. I was secretly delighted, for anything more tiresome than a fortnight's unmitigated von Stohl in the cramped-up s.p.a.ce of a coach I could not imagine. But I felt it my duty to reproach her. She thereupon in great irritation made some not at all agreeable remarks about the unfortunate fate of persons descended from two entirely irresponsible nations, without any sense of duty towards society, a craving for excitement, and no proper regard for the conventions of civilised life.

She said all this whilst I was packing my prettiest gowns for Fort Salisbury, and I, with the light heart of a girl who knows she is going to get her own way, responded with some cheerful reflections on heavy pudding-headed Teutons who had not an ounce of _nous_ in the whole of their make-up, were absolutely lacking in imagination and the spirit of adventure, and simply did not know the meaning of _joie de vivre_. What was the use, I demanded, of sticking in Johannesburg and all the other stupid imitation towns and imagining we were seeing _real_ Africa?

"One might just as well be in England or Germany, except that life in Europe is more comfortable and not so expensive. What I want to see-- besides d.i.c.k, of course--is the illimitable veldt, and Brother Boer, and prowling lions, and Lobengula's fifty wives."

Elizabet von Stohl had answered that her desire was not unto these things. I then, having pitifully but very firmly told her that of course she could not help having been born a German, went out and telegraphed to d.i.c.k to come down to Johannesburg and fetch me. I thought I would give convention a fair deal. However, he wired back:

"Impossible. You must not think of coming up here at present. Country very unsettled. May be trouble with the natives at any time."

That was ridiculous, of course. If his wife could be up there, why couldn't I? And if he couldn't fetch me, well, it was quite simple to buy a ticket for the coach journey and go up by myself. There was nothing monstrous in that! What did it matter about the country being unsettled if one had a revolver and was an excellent shot?

Certainly twenty pounds was an amazing price for a coach ticket. But the coach agent never said a word about its being a dangerous journey, or tried to dissuade me in any way. On the contrary he told me that it was a beautiful country, and that he was sure I should have a very agreeable time. That was _something_ for my twenty pounds.

When I showed the ticket to Madame von Stohl she expostulated more bitterly than ever, and said she should cable to Aunt Betty, failing that, to Mr Rhodes, the Governor of Natal, Dr Jameson, and the Bishop of Grahamstown. On my suggestion that the King of Timbuctoo might also be a good man to consult she turned dark blue. Afterwards she made a gesture like the washing of hands and said that I might go my ways, for which I was very much obliged to her. And I did go them two days later behind eight prancing mules, in company with a cheerful telegraphist for Tuli, and a missionary who travelled in dancing pumps and a mackintosh.

Since then the magnificent red four-wheeled coach we had set out in had been changed for "cart, carriage, wheel-barrow, and donkey-cart"; drawn sometimes by mules, sometimes by oxen; driven by men sometimes black, sometimes white, sometimes yellow, but always profane.

At Tuli we had shed the telegraphist, with regret, for he was a merry and ingenious soul, full of plots for the commissariat and the general comfort. At Palapchwe the missionary got off to call on Khama, the King of the Bechuanas, who likes missionaries, though not to eat. The poor man was minus his dancing pumps, having left them unwillingly in a mud-hole where the cart had been stuck for several hours and we had been obliged to flee for our lives from a horde of mosquitoes as large as quail.

From Palapchwe I had travelled alone, but always in the care of reliable drivers, and wherever there were telegraph stations I found that d.i.c.k, (who had come round, once he knew I was well _en route_) had wired to people to meet me and do all they could for me, and I had experienced nothing but kindness and hospitality from the settlers, and storekeepers and the officers at the police camps. On the third day out from Palapchwe, however, my good driver had broken his arm, and been hastily replaced by a man whom the coach agent did not know so well but hoped would be reliable. This was my friend of the oystery eyes who so vociferously bellowed--_Hirrrr... rrr... rrie-yoh doppers!... Slaagte eiseltjies_!

Night was on us at last. The pace of the mules grew slacker and slacker: they were reaching the end of their run, and obviously the end of their endurance. The rush of water could be plainly heard on the still air, and close ahead loomed the denser, taller bush that on the veldt invariably outlines the banks of a river.

I began to think rather wistfully of the little tin hotel or thatched store I knew must be near, where we would outspan for the night. The travellers' bedrooms in such "hotels" were the most amazing and extraordinary places I had ever met, but they were nevertheless an improvement on my present confined quarters. I should at least be able to stretch my cramped limbs, and there would be lights and perhaps a cup of tea, and hot water to wash off the suffocating dust. These things had never yet failed me at the various halting places, and there was nearly always a woman of some kind to do her best for me.

The driver presently got down from his seat, lighted a lantern, and going to the head of the team began to guide his tired mules along the broken road. This was now little more than a wide foot-path, waggon-rutted and holed-out by the hoofs of the beasts of burden that had gone before. The stumps of trees chopped down by the axes of the Pioneers were still green and sappy in the track, and the wheels of the cart jarred against rocks that traffic had not worn down, and crushed through the houses of white ants who had not yet acquired the wisdom to build elsewhere than on the road leading to the country of Cecil Rhodes.

At last the cart stood still. The driver swinging his lantern went on alone and in a few moments was lost sight of in the bush. The mules began to quiver in an eerie way, and the trembling of them subtly communicated itself to the cart which also began to quiver and creak like an animate thing. I shivered and pulled a rug round my shoulders.

It seemed we had come to a lonely and desolate spot. The trees standing black against the stars looked enormous and sinister, and there was something menacing in that sound of swift rushing water.

After a long while the driver came stumbling back, fixed his lantern on a hook in front of the cart, and began to be extremely busy with the mules. The jingle of harness falling to the ground was heard, accompanied by more creaking and shivering. My interest was aroused.

"What are you doing, driver?" I asked sharply. I knew quite well this could not be right. If the mules were unharnessed how could we reach that most desirable little tin hotel? The driver answered in a voice considerably thicker and more incoherent than the last time I had heard it (greased lightning, I had observed, frequently has this effect upon the vocal cords):

"River's full--cart can't cross d' drift to-night."

"But the little tin--the hotel--?"

"Hotels d' other side," was the laconic response, and he continued to undo the mules. Harness fell around him like hail.