by Frank Norris
Cassandra grinned.
“Heigh-ho,” says she. “I have just been to the Orpheum with Leander. You know Leander, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said I, looking deep; “miserable little snob!” Cassandra looked hurt. “He has always been very nice to me. What have you got against him?”
“Well, I have enough against him. The other night he called on me, and you know he’s awfully struck on me, and, besides, he’s awfully bashful. Well, we sat on the sofa, and the first thing I knew the light went out.”
“Didn’t pay your gas bill,” grinned Cassandra.
“And — well — well, he kissed me.”
“Phyllis!” gasped Cassandra.
“Course I was awfully cut up, not being used to that sort of thing, but I knew he was too bashful to speak, so I considered it as good as an engagement.”
“Well,” said Cass.
“‘The next day he wrote it up in The Surf, saying I led him on. Did you ever hear anything so dreadful?”
“O, I don’t know. We had a fine time at the Orpheum, and I like him. If—”
But here the Endeavorers commenced the closing hymn and Cass and I left.
“Now,” said Just’, looking up from the paper, “what do you think of that?”
I confess I was staggered, but I began to protest feebly.
“I didn’t give that girl cause to think I was bashful, did I, and I’m not ‘struck on her’ as she says, and she’s not ‘struck’ on me. If we’d been ‘struck on’ each other it would have been all right.”
“Well, then, she’s not ‘struck on’ you as you say. What were her words, ‘miserable little snob’?”
I crossed a leg uneasily. “Let’s talk of something else.”
“As you please,” said Just’, “and to begin with, or to end with (for I don’t think we shall talk together much after to-day), you, Leander, who have been carrying on so about the vagaries of the San Francisco girls—”
And the men, too.
“And the men, too, have pointed out the evil, but can’t you suggest also the remedy?”
“Heaven and earth,” I gasped, “because certain things go wrong according to my notion why should I, of all people, be expected to set them right?”
“At least let us defend our opinions. If we are to give them away, let’s send ’em well wrapped up and protected from breakage and weather.”
“Well,” replied I, “it isn’t necessary to tell a girl not to smoke cigarettes nor drink cocktails, is it?”
“Might tell ’em what the men think of it.”
“Humph, they’d say they didn’t do it to please the men.”
“Then they must do it because they have a taste for tobacco and alcohol—”
“Horrors!”
“Which is much worse.”
“The men think they are little fools.”
“And say so to each other.”
“And about the girls that allow themselves to be kissed by men whom they are not ‘struck on’ and who are not ‘struck on’ them, and permit the ‘little familiarities’ we were talking about?”
“The men think they are mighty cheap.”
“And say so to each other.”
“But aren’t there some men who kiss and don’t tell?”
“That’s what some girls think,” said I. “But when a man can kiss a girl easily, it’s the nature of the beast to let other men know about it.”
“I guess yes,” said Just’, scratching his head. “You see it stands to reason that if a girl don’t mind being kissed she doesn’t mind having it known. If you win a girl easy you can’t respect her very much. You’d just as soon talk about her. And if you don’t say right out that the next man can kiss her, you say ‘Hoh! yes, So-and-so, you can have a good time with her.’”
“Sounds fine, don’t it,” said I. “The girls ought to hear, but how about the young fellows who come to functions drunk and dance with the girls?”
“The girl is to blame for that. She ought to refuse to dance with a man when he’s that way — call him down so hard that it will almost sober him, or, better still, tell some other man about it — some other man who is ‘struck on’ her.”
“Would the other man punch his head?”
“He ought to. Suppose it was the girl you know — the one particular girl. For instance, Miss—”
“We won’t discuss ‘that girl’,” I interrupted, glaring at him fiercely.
“That’s so, and that makes me think. The men have got something to learn, too.”
“For instance.”
“Well, for one thing, never to talk of a good, straight girl among themselves; say nothing about her, good, bad or indifferent. You know yourself how it cheapens a girl to have her talked about in a club, or anywhere, when men get together. I’ve heard it done in a barroom, even, and I know a man who used to telephone to a girl from the Deception Saloon.”
“Beast!”
“No. This man didn’t think, I guess. Maybe that’s the trouble with most of ‘em. A little more convention, that’s what we all need — nothing stiff or formal or false or prudish. I hate it as bad as any of them, but in Heaven’s name let’s have some girls who don’t let every man that’s known ’em a month sit with them in the dark and kiss ’em when he likes, and let’s have — or, rather, let’s say we’ve got to have, in the name of ordinary decency, men who will not come to functions drunk or get intoxicated where nice girls are around.”
“Surely it’s little enough to ask.”
“Is this our last talk?”
“Guess yes.”
“Then here’s to a better state TABLEDICKENS¼of things next season.” We raised our cups.
“Tea and toast,” said I.
“It’s mildly appropriate to drink that toast in tea,” answered Just’. “Here’s to conventionalities in moderation.”
“Amen and Amen,” said I.
And we drank — standing up.
SOUTH AFRICAN ARTICLES
A CALIFORNIAN IN THE CITY OF CAPE TOWN
CAPE TOWN (South Africa), December p, 1895 — For three weeks the Norham Castle had perseveringly screwed her way southward through an empty sea. Upon the equator she had slid through still, oily waters, blue as indigo, level as a cathedral floor, broken only by the quick flash and flight of hundreds of flying fish, flocks of them flushed by the passage of the great hull. But since those three or four perfect days that she had met and passed upon either side of the line, she had butted her nose into persistent northerly trades. All at once, however, upon the evening of the last day of the voyage these left us. The weather grew suddenly warmer, and the poor old cow that for twenty-one days had been cooped in her portable stall by the hoisting engine on the forward deck began to low excitedly and blew with her nostrils through the cracks of her box because she smelt the earth once more and caught the odour of the fields and growing trees.
We had all crowded forward watching for land, but the sun went down behind an unbroken horizon and drew the hood of the night after it with the quickness of a flying cloud, and we remembered that we had once more forgotten that there is no twilight in the tropics. It was night all at once, and the few sparse stars of the Southern skies flashed out with a suddenness that was almost flippant, and that reminded one of the sudden flaring up of the lights in the theatre just before the orchestra comes in to tune up. The night was very dark, and the inky black prow of the Norham went on describing jagged and serrated pattern’s against the sky and heaving itself against a very faint blur of golden light about a certain point on the horizon. This little haze of light ought not to have been the rising moon, for it was due south, and that is why we watched it with such intense interest, for if it was not the moon it was the light of something else, the haze thrown up into the sky by the lights of a city on land. And it grew stronger and brighter with every forward roll of the great ship, and then, all at once, right at its core a light flashed out and disappeared and flashed again, and everyone
cried out at the same time, and you felt, as it were, a little thrill down in your throat, for that was a light on the land that you had come so far to see. It was Africa. The great “Dark Continent,” dark enough under that moonless sky, stretching out there behind the horizon for so many miles of pathless forest and nameless desert.
The first impression of Cape Town is that it is more provincial than one expected. You had imagined that the oldest civilized town in South Africa would be at least a small city, but its people yet prefer to walk in the street instead of upon the sidewalk, and still speak with pride of the electric lights and call the stranger’s attention to them. An electric light plant appears to be the great ambition of the growing town in South Africa, as well as in the Indian Territory. Before even the system of sewerage is thought of or the stationary washstand has become a fixture the great electric poles spring up at the street corners, with outriggers and wire cables, looking for all the world like enormous grasshoppers upon their hind legs, and the patriotic citizen is happy and contented and writes home about it.
Another thing totally different from your preconceived ideas was the weather. Certainly South Africa should be tropical, with a blazing vertical sun; the houses should be dazzling white, and the dust, fine and thick as shredded velvet, baked white hot, and one should go about with a Panama hat on one’s head, a palm-leaf fan in one hand, and an iced drink in the other.
Why was it, then, that we should land from the steamer in a fine, cold rain? How did it happen that on a visit to Sea Point, one of the fashionable suburbs, where Cecil Rhodes has his villa, we had to proceed in the teeth of a wind as biting and fierce as ever drove the fog down the streets of the Western Addition of San Francisco of an August afternoon? Why is it that a cape coat and an umbrella are indispensable if one wishes to go abroad with any degree of comfort? Why should things invariably be different from what you had imagined?
The 30,000 souls who make up the population of Cape Town are English, Dutch, Malays, and French. The English, of course, are in the enormous majority. The Dutch have been practically crowded out and have gone “up country” into the Transvaal. One hardly sees more than their traces in the names of localities round about the town, in a few Dutch words that the English still use, and in occasional bits of architecture in the older part of the town, ancient windows and doors that put one in mind of Howard Pyle’s pictures of old New York. The traces of the French are even vaguer, though one is told that they were the first settlers. It may be legend, or it may be history that a colony of French emigrated to this spot after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. At any rate, it is rather interesting. Certainly there are families here, old residents, with French names, though they call themselves English and speak French only as they have learned it as children from their governesses or instructors.
The English are not more interesting or picturesque than the English of the Strand or of Pall Mall. It is true that the Colonial Englishman has adopted the pukaree about his hat, but otherwise he is the same Englishman that you might meet in London, in Simla, in the Gilbert Islands, in New Zealand, or in Kamchatka.
The picturesque element to be found in the streets is afforded by the Malays. The discovery of such a quantity of these people in Cape Town is less surprising than the fact that they should be here at all. Why Malays any more than Hindus or Persians or Egyptians? They are a yellow race, the better class wear the fez, but without the tassel. The poorer among them carry enormous sun hats of woven straw, shaped like an inverted teetotum. The women are apt to be very fat, dressing in vivid green shawls, and in pink calico skirts, enormous like the crinolines of’64. Their headdress is a white linen cloth, wound about the head, covering the forehead and the mouth. The children wear clogs like those of the Japanese, only somewhat higher, a peg between the first and second toes answering the purposes of straps and lacings. These clogs, I am told, are of Zulu make.
I have been on the lookout for Zulus, Kaffirs, and the like, but as yet I cannot say I have seen one pure-blooded native. Cape Town is swarming with Negroes, all the manual labour, such as bricklaying, carpentering, ditching, teaming, etc., seems to be performed by them, and every cab driver is coloured. In appearance they are not at all unlike our own blacks, but they are a mongrel race, Malay, Dutch, and Hottentot grafted upon the original Kaffir stock. They have a language of their own, but what it is I am sure I don’t know.
Just back of the town, perhaps five miles distant, rises one of the grandest mountains imaginable, naked rock, jagged and splintered, a veritable Gibraltar. From the suburbs the slope is easy enough up to the 2,000-foot point, and then at a single jump the enormous rock goes up to 4,000 feet, sheer, as perpendicular as the sides of a house. Column after column of granite or basalt, or whatever it is, clinging together like the pipes of some gigantic organ, rising up there through the rain and mist and wind till one’s neck aches with effort of following their course, and then, strange enough, at the 4,000-foot point, long before the great cone has been completed, the rise abruptly stops. What promised to be a mountain suddenly transforms itself into a tableland. The whole cap is lacking. Instead of peak you have plateau, as level and as regular as any meadow land. It makes one think of some great career full of promise and of towering ambition that was to reach to the clouds abruptly failing in midcourse, giving up, cut short and disappointed, suddenly becoming flat and common, abandoning its lofty prospects and aspiring hopes, remaining only a promise, a might-have-been, a failure.
There is a circus in town. Not our kind of circus with its swelling canvas, blue slats for seats, and mangy menagerie, but a circus in a sort of rotunda built of corrugated sheet iron, chairs for seats and no menagerie at all. Its great attraction, however, is the “show given after the ring performance.” This is called the “Matabele War,” and in South Africa takes the place of the Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in the United States. A few nights ago our party went to see this show, and with us went a certain Major Goold-Adams. It is very probable that this name means nothing to you. In the history of South Africa it sounds as the names of Washington and Grant and Sheridan sound to us. It was Goold-Adams who, as commander of the Bechuanaland border police, together with Major Forbes and Captain Wilson, defeated and subjugated Lobengula and his 5,000 Matabeles in the Matabele War of 1893-1894. That Major Adams should be with our party a spectator of such a show promised to be more interesting than the show itself. It was my great good fortune to sit by the side of the Major throughout the whole of the representation. On the other side of me sat a boy, a miserable bigheaded, little boy of nineteen, who knew everything and who did not intend to be carried away by any sham battle in a circus. No, sir; not he. I knew him rather slightly, for we had been fellow passengers on board the Norham. The show began with a dance of seventy Matabeles (perhaps they were Matabeles and perhaps they were only mongrel Malays) and was carried through to the bitter end in the midst of blood and powder smoke and clubbed muskets, winding up with the inevitable “God Save the Queen.” Well, perhaps it was a sorry show. One can’t get Matabeleland and a two-months’ war into a forty-foot sawdust ring in an hour and a half. It is very possible that too much was attempted and not enough suggested to the imagination, and perhaps it was very silly and boyish for me to get excited over it all and to have asked myself so often “was it as bad as that on the Shangani River, and did Wilson and his thirty-seven heroes die as bravely as these circus hands in their hired uniforms would have us believe?” But, after all, the real interest of the occasion, for me at least, centred about Major Goold-Adams and in observing the contrast between his behaviour and that of the little, big-headed boy.
The little, big-headed boy had a contemptuous smile for everything. There was no illusion for his world-worn eyes. You couldn’t fool him. No, sir! He detected every sham; he ridiculed every ranting speech of poor, old, overdone Lobengula; he laughed at the discharges of blank cartridges, and he vowed that one of those Matabele indunas had blacked his boots that morning in Adderly St
reet. Every time I was tricked into being carried away by the excitement of the moment, every time I fancied myself on the Shangani, he sharply called me back to sordid, commonplace Cape Town, and the commonplace circus, and the commonplace corrugated iron rotunda, the dirty sawdust, and the raw glare of the electric lights.
This wretched little boy, who was above such trivialities, leaned across me to the old soldier and exclaimed:
“I say, Major Adams, this is tommy-rot enough, isn’t it?”
But the Major did not answer him. He was far away. Away up there in Mashonaland, up north of the Shangani, and the circus hands in their hired uniforms were his own “B. B. P’s,” and the bootblacks and Malay stevedores were the impis of the Matabele king. He leaned forward there in his seat, breathing forty to the minute, tugging nervously at his moustache, as interested and excited as though he were any little child, and not the veteran officer who had actually fought through that very same campaign and who could know from his own experience exactly where the show was at fault.
When it was all over and we were going out we asked him what he thought of it, and the little big-headed boy did not hesitate to declare that his gate money ought to have been returned to him.
“It took twelve hours,” said the Major thoughtfully. For a long time he would say nothing else. He was absent-minded, his thoughts were elsewhere.
“It took twelve hours.”
“What took twelve hours?”
“It took twelve hours to kill them all. Wilson’s party, you know. The Matabeles told me how it was afterward. And the last man, with both thighs smashed by the same bullet, crawled to an ant heap with his Martini and a handful of cartridges and — ah, well. It’s over and done with now. I declare I’m rather thirsty.”
San Francisco Chronicle, January 19, 1896.
FROM CAPE TOWN TO KIMBERLEY MINE
JOHANNESBURG, December 15, 1895. — I left Cape Town on the 10th of December, late at night, in a wild storm of sleet and wind and rain, with the temperature low enough to warrant the wearing of one’s heaviest winter clothes, and woke the next morning to find the train rolling over a baked and sun-cracked desert in the midst of mirages, sand spouts, ostriches, and things. It was the Karoo, the vast table lying between Cape Town and Kimberley.