by Talbot Mundy
“Bring the Nyamwezi here!” he ordered, and the askaris hustled him up in front of the table.
“What do you do? Have you no manners? Return proper thanks for the lesson you have received!”
Kazimoto stood silent.
“For God’s sake—” Will began.
“Say ‘Thank you’ to him, Kazimoto!” Fred whispered.
There is no native word for “Thank you” — only a bastard thing introduced by tyrants from Europe who never understood the African contention that the giver rewards himself if his gift is worth anything at all.
“Asente,” said Kazimoto meekly.
“Why don’t you salute? Don’t you know where you are?”
“For the love of God salute him!” Will almost shouted.
Kazimoto obeyed.
“Take him and put him on the chain-gang!” ordered the lieutenant. “You
Europeans leave the court!”
“I’m no European!” Will shouted back. “Thank the Lord I was born in a country you’ll never set foot in!”
“Take them away before I have to make an example of them!” the lieutenant ordered.
Obediently the askaris gathered about us and hustled us out into the open, poking at my bandaged wound to get swifter action, and going as far as to threaten us with their hippo-hide whips. I trod on the naked toe of one of them with sufficient suddenness and weight to deprive him of the use of it for all time, and luckily for me he did not see who did it. The askari next to him had boots on, and got the blame.
The black men who were to search our belongings tried to induce us to hurry, but we insisted on seeing the iron ring riveted to Kazimoto’s neck. The ring had a shackle on it, and through that they passed the long chain that held him prisoner in the midst of a gang of forty men. Nobody washed the wounds on his back. We bought water from a woman who was passing with a great jar on her head, and did that much for him. He was naked. His clothes that the askaris had torn from him had been thrown outside the court, and some one had stolen them. Later they gave him a piece of cheap calico to bind round his waist, but during all that hot afternoon he had nothing to keep the sun from his tortured back; nor would they permit us to give him anything.
The mortification of having one’s private belongings gone through by black men in uniform was made more exasperating still by the fact that Coutlass and the other Greek and the Goanese were spectators, amusing themselves with comments that came nearer to causing murder than they guessed.
The real motive of the search was evident within two minutes from the commencement. The askaris could not read, but they showed a most remarkable affinity for paper that had been written on. They took the guns and ammunition first, but after that they emptied everything from our bags and boxes on to the sand, and confiscated every scrap of paper, shaking our books to make sure nothing was left between the leaves.
They even took away our writing material in their zeal to find information likely to prove useful to their masters. But they forgot to search our pockets, so that they overlooked the letter we had written in code to Monty and had not yet sent away by messenger.
That letter became our most besetting problem. How to find a runner who would take it to British East and mail it for us up there without betraying us first to the Germans was something we could not guess. Even Fred grew gloomy when we realized there was probably not a native on the whole countryside with sufficient manhood left in him to dare make the attempt. The first overture we might make would almost certainly be reported to the commandant at once.
“What fools we were not to send Kazimoto with it when he begged us to!”
“What worse than fools!”
“What brutes! Think what we might have saved him!”
We were unanimous as to that, but unanimity brought no comfort, until we all together hit on a notion that did ease our feelings a trifle. Coutlass and his two friends were sitting on camp-stools in the open where they could have a full view of our doings. Assuming the camping-ground to be equally divided between their party and ours, they were well within our portion. We decided their curiosity was insolent, declared inexorable war, and there and then felt better.
Fred went out with a tent-peg and scored in the sand a deep line to denote our boundary, the Greeks watching, all eyes and guesswork.
“Over the other side with you!” Fred ordered when he had finished.
They refused. He charged at them, and they ran.
“Whichever of you, man or servant, sets foot on our side of that line shall be a dead-sure hospital case!” Fred announced. “We’ll reciprocate by leaving your side of the camp to you!”
“Who made you men rulers of this rest-camp?” Coutlass demanded.
“We did,” Fred answered. “We’ve lost our rifles just as you have.
We’ll fight you with bare hands and skin you alive if you trespass!”
“Gassharamminy!” shouted Coutlass. “By hell and Waterloo, you mistake me for a weakling! Wait and see!”
We had to wait a very long and weary time, but we did see. In the days that followed, when my wound festered and I grew too ill to drag myself about, Fred and Will were able to leave me alone in the camp without any fear of a visit from the Greeks. It was not that there was much left worth stealing, but a mere visit from them might have had consequences we could never have offset. Alone, unable to rise, I could not have forced them to leave, and their lingering would surely have been interpreted by the guard, who always watched them from the corner of the road, as evidence of collusion of some sort between them and us.
Just at that time Coutlass, as it happened, would have liked nothing better in the world than the chance to persuade the Germans that he was in our councils. Fred’s mere irritable determination to divide the camp in halves saved us in all human probability from a trap out of which there would have been no escape.
CHAPTER NINE
“SPEAK YE, AND SO DO”
Ok Thou, who gavest English speech
To both our Anglo-Saxon breeds,
And didst adown all ages teach
That Art of crowning words with deeds,
May we, who use the speech, be blest
With bravery, that when shall come
In thy full time our hour of test —
That promised hour of Christendom,
We may be found, whate’er our need,
How grim soe’er our circumstance,
Unwilling to be fed or freed,
Or fame or fortune to enhance
By flinching from the good begun,
By broken word or serpent plan,
Or cruelty in malice done
To helpless beast or subject man.
Amen
There was method, of course, behind the difference in treatment extended to us and to the Greeks. The motive for making Coutlass sell his mules and stay within the miserable confines of the rest-camp was to make sure he had money enough to feed himself, and to cut off all opportunity for swift escape. Not for a second were the Germans sufficiently unwary to admit collusion with him.
The real ownership of the three mules was left in little doubt when they were sold at public auction and bought in by Schillingschen. Fred and Will attended the auction the day following our scene in court, and extracted a lot of amusement from bidding against Schillinschen, compelling him finally to pay a good sum more than the mules were worth.
Coutlass was in a strange predicament. The looting of Brown’s cattle had been a bid for fortune on his own account. Yet by causing us to give chase he had brought us into the German net more handily than ever they had hoped. So it was reasonable on his part to suppose that if he could betray us more completely still, he might get rewarded instead of treated as a broken tool.
Yet he did not dare to approach our camp, for fear lest Fred should carry out his threat and fight. The fight would certainly be reported by the askari on watch at the crossroads, and that would destroy his chance of making believe to be in our confidenc
e. So he kept sending notes to me when the others were absent, even the native boy who brought them — not daring to enter our camp, but fastening the message to a stone and throwing it in through the tent door.
They were strange, illiterate messages, childishly conceived, varying between straight-out offers to help us escape and dark insinuations that he knew of something it would pay us well to investigate.
It was an English missionary spending three days in Muanza on his way to Lake Tanganika, who came to see what he could do for my wound and cleared up the mystery quite a little by reporting what he had heard in the non-commissioned mess, where he had been invited to eat a meal.
“The Greek,” he said, “is trying to curry favor by pretending he knows your plans. If he succeeds in worming into your confidence and persuading you to make plans to escape with him, they will feel justified in putting you in jail — and that, I understand, is where they want you.”
“Will you do me a favor?” I asked.
He hesitated. It was kindness that had sent him down to ease my pain, if possible, not anti-Germanism; it was part of German policy to pose as the friend of all missionaries, and if anything he was prejudiced against us — particularly against Brown, whom he had visited in jail, and who assured him the only hymn he ever sang was “Beer, glorious beer!”
“That depends,” he answered.
“We are quite sure any letters we write will be opened,” I said.
He answered that he could hardly believe that.
“If we could send a letter unopened to British East it would solve our worst problem,” I told him. “If you know of a dependable messenger who would carry our letter, I would contribute fifty pounds out of my own pocket to the funds of your mission.”
I made a mistake there, and realized it the next moment.
“What kind of letter is worth fifty pounds?” he asked me. “Isn’t it something illegal that you fear might get you into worse trouble if opened and read?”
I argued in vain, and only made my case worse by citing as an instance of German official turpitude the staff surgeon’s neglect of me.
“But he tells me you refuse to be treated by him!” he answered. “He says you enter his hospital and are insolent if he happens to be too busy to attend to you at once. He says you refuse to let a native orderly dress your wound!”
He had been entertained to one meal at the commandant’s house on the hill, and regaled by awful accounts of our ferocity. I did not succeed in inserting as much as the thin end of a different view until he asked me how a man’s name could be professor Schillingschen and his wife’s Lady Isobel Saffren Waldon.
“I don’t understand about titles,” he said. “Shouldn’t she take his name, or else he hers, or something?”
I assured him that marriage had never as much as entered the head of either of them.
“They’re simply living together,” I said. “He’s a cynical brute. She’s a designing female!”
The missionary mind recoiled and refused to believe me. But after he had thought the matter over and seen the probability, he swung over to a sort of lame admission that a few more of my statements might perhaps be true.
“I will take your letter and guarantee its delivery in British East, provided I may read it and do not disapprove of its contents.” he volunteered.
“That’s not unreasonable,” I said, “but the letter is in code.”
“I should have to see it decoded.”
I told him to find Fred and Will. He came on them sitting smoking under the great rock near the waterfront that had been inset with a bronze medallion of Bismarck, and startled them almost into committing an assault on him, by saying that he wanted our secret code at once. They had been trying to get tobacco to Brown, and sweetmeats to Kazimoto, had failed in both efforts and were short-tempered. He explained after they had insulted him sufficiently, and they walked down to the camp one on either hand, apologizing all the way. I imagine they had criticized missions of all denominations pretty thoroughly.
In the end he decided not to read the letter at all.
“I have reached the conclusion you three men are gentlemen,” he said, “and would not take advantage of me. I will take your letter to Ujiji, and send it to the south end of Lake Tanganika, to be put in the British mail bag for Mombasa by way of Durban. It will take a long time to reach its destination — perhaps two months; but I will have it registered, and it will undoubtedly get there.”
That he kept his word and better we had ample proof later on, but I did not bless him particularly fervidly at the time, for he went straight to the doctor and repeated my complaints. He left for Ujiji the next day, and the net result of his friendly interference was that the doctor refused me any sort of attention at all — even a change of bandages.
Fred and Will did their best for me, but it was little. I read in their faces, and in their studied cheerfulness when speaking in my presence, that they had made up their minds I was going to lose the number of my mess. They went to the commandant and the lieutenant besides the doctor in efforts to secure for me some sort of consideration, but without result; and they wrote at least six letters to the British East African Protectorate government that we ascertained afterward never reached their destination. They tried to register one letter, but registration was refused.
“Why don’t they jail us simply, and have done with it?” — Will kept wondering aloud.
“They will when it suits their books,” said I. “For the present they scarcely dare. Word might reach the British government. They’re breaking no international law by holding us here and keeping tabs on us.”
Before many days I grew unable to leave the hard cork mattress on the camp-bed in Fred’s tent. They went again to the commandant, this time determined to force the issue.
“I will send some one,” he told them, and they came away delighted that strong language should succeed where politeness formerly had failed.
But all the commandant did send was an askari twice a day, to lean on his rifle in the tent door, leer at me, and march away again.
“He comes to see if I’m dead,” said I. “It would be inconvenient to have me die in jail; there might be inquiries afterward from British East. After I’m dead and buried they’ll jail you two healthy ones, and keep you until you ‘blab’!”
“Why don’t we straight out tell ’em we don’t know a thing about the ivory?” wondered Will.
“Because they wouldn’t believe us!” Fred answered.
Seven days after the sentry’s first call the doctor took to coming in person to look at me. He never except once stepped inside the tent, but was satisfied to give me a glance of contempt and go away again, once or twice taking pains to inspect the Greeks’ camp before leaving. He usually had Schubert trailing in his wake, and gave him stern orders about sanitation which nobody ever carried out. The sanitary conditions of that rest-camp were simply non-existent until we came there, and we had gone to no pains on the Greeks’ account.
But the Greeks did us an unexpected good turn, though it looked like making more trouble for us at the time. They began to complain of lack of exercise, and to grow actually sick for want of it. Because of that, and jealousy, they raised a clamor about our freedom to go anywhere within township limits as against their strict confinement to the camp. The commandant came down to the camp in person to hear what they had to say, and being in a good humor saw fit to yield a point. Being a military German, though, he could not do it without attaching ignominious conditions.
There was a band attached to the local company of Sudanese — an affair consisting of four native war-drums and two fifes. They knew eight bars of one tune, and were proud of it, the fifers blowing with beef and pluck and the drummers thundering native fashion, which means that the only difference between their noise and a thunder-storm was in the tempo.
Day after day, twice a day, whether it rained or shone, it seemed to be the law that this “band” should patrol the whole township
limits, playing its only tune, lifting the tops of men’s heads with its infernal drumming, and delighting nobody except the players and the township urchins, who marched in its wake rejoicing.
The Greeks and the Goanese were given leave to march with the band twice a day for the sake of exercise. They refused indignantly. The commandant flew into the rage that is the birthright of all German officials, but suddenly checked himself; he had a brilliant idea.
He withdrew the permission and changed it to an order that Coutlass and his two friends should march with the band twice daily for the sake of their health, on pain of imprisonment should they refuse.
“And I will prove to you,” he said, “that the good German rule is impartial. All aliens awaiting trial and confined within the township limits shall march with the band if they are able!” As an afterthought he added magnanimously: “Those in the jail, too, provided they have not been sentenced for serious crimes!”
So Coutlass, his Greek friend, the Goanese, Fred, Will, and Brown of Lumbwa marched about the town twice daily, at seven in the morning and three in the afternoon, a journey of five miles, Fred and Will making no objection because it gave them a chance to talk with Brown. There were strict orders against talking, and four askaris armed with rifles marched behind to enforce the rule as well as keep guard over Brown. But the drums were so thunderous and the shrill fifes so lusty that the askaris could not hear conversation pitched in low tones.
“Brown says,” said Fred, returning from the first march, “that he sleeps with only a sheet of corrugated iron between him and the ward where the chain-gang lies. He can talk with Kazimoto when he happens to be at that end of the chain. They’ve nothing but planks to lie on, any of them. He says Kazimoto seems determined to kill the lieutenant who sentenced him, and as soon as he’s off the chain we’d better grab him and hurry him out of the country.”