XXX
A Double Exile
Hail, dark mother of wanderers, parched nurse of lions! Amidst thy romantic wildernesses grief and dishonour may forget themselves; with thee man is only man! He leaves that other half of himself, reputation, yonder in the crowd, and in these solitudes becomes a creature of thews and sinews, valuable only for his strength and endurance, for the range of his eye and the truth of his hand. He has done with the outward shows of life, and with all nice differences between good and bad. Here, worth is to be measured by the hunter’s fleetness of foot, and honour by the marksman’s aim. What a man is counts for but little; what he can do for much. In that aching misery which possessed him when he left England, John Vansittart looked to the desert as his best refuge. The hunter’s life in Mashonaland gives scanty leisure for brooding over the ruins of a home in England. The early trek with the wagons, or the start on foot from the skerm; the hard day’s tramp under the blazing sun; the need of providing meat for the boys—the long following on the spoor of giraffe or antelope, with the wild ride or cautious stalk at the end—which that need involves; the charm of the life, its poetry, its absolute novelty, and the ever-recurring vicissitudes which each new day brings forth, leave the head of the expedition briefest time for introspective thought. His slumbers are for the most part dreamless; or his dreams are of lions prowling by the campfire, or of the dark forms and wild gestures of those he has last seen dancing by its flickering light; not of the lost faces of home. Best of all, his conscience is at ease, for face to face with man in his most primitive aspect he loses the habit of weighing his past acts and comparing, with futile regret, the things he has done with the things he ought to have done.
For Vansittart there could have been no better refuge than the desert.
Here, if his heart wounds were not healed, his consciousness of sin was deadened. Here, where no exaggerated value was set on human life, he could remember Harold Marchant’s death with less intensity of pain. Here, where the native freely turned his gun or his assegai against his fellow-man, a mischance such as that of Florian’s Caffè seemed a small thing—the fortune of war, a spurt of anger, an unlucky blow, and there an end. Every man must die somehow; and it may not be the worst doom to drop down in the fullness of youth and vigour, knowing not the slow agonies of gradual extinction, the torture of dying by inches.
Vansittart’s thoughts were tempered by his surroundings. His character took new colours in that vivid life, in that lapse backward from the civilized and the complicated to the primitive stage of man’s history. It was as if Time had turned his glass and the earth were young. The wild race of Cain, the outcast, could have been no wilder than these woolly-haired followers of his, who were faithful to him because he was a good shot.
Nature, the great consoler, helped him to forget his grief by forgetting himself. Here, face to face with Nature’s mightiest forces, man’s sense of his own personality dwindles to the faintest shadow in the vastness of his surroundings. Instead of Trafalgar Square he has the Falls of the Zambesi; instead of the languid club lounger he has the elephant and the lion for his companions—the purring growl of the lion instead of the gossip of the smoking-room; the trumpet of the elephant instead of the chatter of the dinner-table. Surely it is good for a man to be alone in the wilderness—alone save for the company of followers to whom, though he be their leader, he is as another being, a white man, a stranger in their land, between whose thoughts and feelings and their own a great gulf is forever fixed. It is good for him to feel his own insignificance among men who value him only for his powder and shot, and who will lose their reverence for his white superiority with the spending of his last cartridge. Here he must needs forget that pride of place which at home was a part of his being. Here there are no tradesmen to fawn upon him, no servants to touch their hats to him, no women to praise him. Small food for vanity here, where the darkies call his smooth, flat hair dog’s hair, and who liken his hairy arm to a baboon’s arm. Here if the women fawn upon him it is not for his smiles or his favour, but for beads or printed calico, such vivid orange or scarlet fabrics, figured with stars or half moons, as Manchester weaves for the Torrid Zone. Here if the men are true to him it is because he can feed them and pay them. He is in a world of stern facts, where sentiment and sophistication are unknown.
The atmosphere suits him. The primitive interests of this primitive life help to shut off that other life where all is gloom, the life of thought and of memory. Sufficient for the day, that is the motto here: food for the day; safety for the day; wood for the fires, water for man and beast. Beside them, behind them, ahead of them, stalk dangers that Europe knows not. Danger from beasts of prey; danger from men as cruel; fever, starvation, death in many shapes—all the vicissitudes of a life between the desert and the sky.
Fortune favours him in his desolation of spirit. A happier
