december 23

‘i have just buried my boy, my poor handsome boy of whom i was so proud, and my heart is broken. it is very hard having only one son to lose him thus, but god’s will be done. who am i that i should complain? the great wheel of fate rolls on like a juggernaut, and crushes us all in turn, some soon, some late—it does not matter when, in the end, it crushes us all. we do not prostrate ourselves before it like the poor indians; we fly hither and thither—we cry for mercy; but it is of no use, the black fate thunders on and in its season reduces us to powder.

‘poor harry to go so soon! just when his life was opening to him. he was doing so well at the hospital, he had passed his last examination with honours, and i was proud of them, much prouder than he was, i think. and then he must needs go to that smallpox hospital. he wrote to me that he was not afraid of smallpox and wanted to gain the experience; and now the disease has killed him, and i, old and grey and withered, am left to mourn over him, without a chick or child to comfort me. i might have saved him, too—i have money enough for both of us, and much more than enough—king solomon’s mines provided me with that; but i said, “no, let the boy earn his living, let him labour that he may enjoy rest.” but the rest has come to him before the labour. oh, my boy, my boy!

‘i am like the man in the bible who laid up much goods and builded barns—goods for my boy and barns for him to store them in; and now his soul has been required of him, and i am left desolate. i would that it had been my soul and not my boy’s!

‘we buried him this afternoon under the shadow of the grey and ancient tower of the church of this village where my house is. it was a dreary december afternoon, and the sky was heavy with snow, but not much was falling. the coffin was put down by the grave, and a few big flakes lit upon it. they looked very white upon the black cloth! there was a little hitch about getting the coffin down into the grave—the necessary ropes had been forgotten: so we drew back from it, and waited in silence watching the big flakes fall gently one by one like heavenly benedictions, and melt in tears on harry’s pall. but that was not all. a robin redbreast came as bold as could be and lit upon the coffin and began to sing. and then i am afraid that i broke down, and so did sir henry curtis, strong man though he is; and as for captain good, i saw him turn away too; even in my own distress i could not help noticing it.’

the above, signed ‘allan quatermain’, is an extract from my diary written two years and more ago. i copy it down here because it seems to me that it is the fittest beginning to the history that i am about to write, if it please god to spare me to finish it. if not, well it does not matter. that extract was penned seven thousand miles or so from the spot where i now lie painfully and slowly writing this, with a pretty girl standing by my side fanning the flies from my august countenance. harry is there and i am here, and yet somehow i cannot help feeling that i am not far off harry.

when i was in england i used to live in a very fine house—at least i call it a fine house, speaking comparatively, and judging from the standard of the houses i have been accustomed to all my life in africa—not five hundred yards from the old church where harry is asleep, and thither i went after the funeral and ate some food; for it is no good starving even if one has just buried all one’s earthly hopes. but i could not eat much, and soon i took to walking, or rather limping—being permanently lame from the bite of a lion—up and down, up and down the oak-panelled vestibule; for there is a vestibule in my house in england. on all the four walls of this vestibule were placed pairs of horns—about a hundred pairs altogether, all of which i had shot myself. they are beautiful specimens, as i never keep any horns which are not in every way perfect, unless it may be now and again on account of the associations connected with them. in the centre of the room, however, over the wide fireplace, there was a clear space left on which i had fixed up all my rifles. some of them i have had for forty years, old muzzle-loaders that nobody would look at nowadays. one was an elephant gun with strips of rimpi, or green hide, lashed round the stock and locks, such as used to be owned by the dutchmen—a ‘roer’ they call it. that gun, the boer i bought it from many years ago told me, had been used by his father at the battle of the blood river, just after dingaan swept into natal and slaughtered six hundred men, women, and children, so that the boers named the place where they died ‘weenen’, or the ‘place of weeping’; and so it is called to this day, and always will be called. and many an elephant have i shot with that old gun. she always took a handful of black powder and a three-ounce ball, and kicked like the very deuce.

well, up and down i walked, staring at the guns and the horns which the guns had brought low; and as i did so there rose up in me a great craving:—i would go away from this place where i lived idly and at ease, back again to the wild land where i had spent my life, where i met my dear wife and poor harry was born, and so many things, good, bad, and indifferent, had happened to me. the thirst for the wilderness was on me; i could tolerate this place no more; i would go and die as i had lived, among the wild game and the savages. yes, as i walked, i began to long to see the moonlight gleaming silvery white over the wide veldt and mysterious sea of bush, and watch the lines of game travelling down the ridges to the water. the ruling passion is strong in death, they say, and my heart was dead that night. but, independently of my trouble, no man who has for forty years lived the life i have, can with impunity go coop himself in this prim english country, with its trim hedgerows and cultivated fields, its stiff formal manners, and its well-dressed crowds. he begins to long—ah, how he longs!—for the keen breath of the desert air; he dreams of the sight of zulu impis breaking on their foes like surf upon the rocks, and his heart rises up in rebellion against the strict limits of the civilized life.

ah! this civilization, what does it all come to? for forty years and more i lived among savages, and studied them and their ways; and now for several years i have lived here in england, and have in my own stupid manner done my best to learn the ways of the children of light; and what have i found? a great gulf fixed? no, only a very little one, that a plain man’s thought may spring across. i say that as the savage is, so is the white man, only the latter is more inventive, and possesses the faculty of combination; save and except also that the savage, as i have known him, is to a large extent free from the greed of money, which eats like a cancer into the heart of the white man. it is a depressing conclusion, but in all essentials the savage and the child of civilization are identical. i dare say that the highly civilized lady reading this will smile at an old fool of a hunter’s simplicity when she thinks of her black bead-bedecked sister; and so will the superfine cultured idler scientifically eating a dinner at his club, the cost of which would keep a starving family for a week. and yet, my dear young lady, what are those pretty things round your own neck?—they have a strong family resemblance, especially when you wear that very low dress, to the savage woman’s beads. your habit of turning round and round to the sound of horns and tom-toms, your fondness for pigments and powders, the way in which you love to subjugate yourself to the rich warrior who has captured you in marriage, and the quickness with which your taste in feathered head-dresses varies—all these things suggest touches of kinship; and you remember that in the fundamental principles of your nature you are quite identical. as for you, sir, who also laugh, let some man come and strike you in the face whilst you are enjoying that marvellous-looking dish, and we shall soon see how much of the savage there is in you.

there, i might go on for ever, but what is the good? civilization is only savagery silver-gilt. a vainglory is it, and like a northern light, comes but to fade and leave the sky more dark. out of the soil of barbarism it has grown like a tree, and, as i believe, into the soil like a tree it will once more, sooner or later, fall again, as the egyptian civilization fell, as the hellenic civilization fell, and as the roman civilization and many others of which the world has now lost count, fell also. do not let me, however, be understood as decrying our modern institutions, representing as they do the gathered experience of humanity applied for the good of all. of course they have great advantages—hospitals for instance; but then, remember, we breed the sickly people who fill them. in a savage land they do not exist. besides, the question will arise: how many of these blessings are due to christianity as distinct from civilization? and so the balance sways and the story runs—here a gain, there a loss, and nature’s great average struck across the two, whereof the sum total forms one of the factors in that mighty equation in which the result will equal the unknown quantity of her purpose.

i make no apology for this digression, especially as this is an introduction which all young people and those who never like to think (and it is a bad habit) will naturally skip. it seems to me very desirable that we should sometimes try to understand the limitations of our nature, so that we may not be carried away by the pride of knowledge. man’s cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron ring. you can go round and round it, you can polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby you will make it bulge out the other, but you will never, while the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference. it is the one fixed unchangeable thing—fixed as the stars, more enduring than the mountains, as unalterable as the way of the eternal. human nature is god’s kaleidoscope, and the little bits of coloured glass which represent our passions, hopes, fears, joys, aspirations towards good and evil and what not, are turned in his mighty hand as surely and as certainly as it turns the stars, and continually fall into new patterns and combinations. but the composing elements remain the same, nor will there be one more bit of coloured glass nor one less for ever and ever.

this being so, supposing for the sake of argument we divide ourselves into twenty parts, nineteen savage and one civilized, we must look to the nineteen savage portions of our nature, if we would really understand ourselves, and not to the twentieth, which, though so insignificant in reality, is spread all over the other nineteen, making them appear quite different from what they really are, as the blacking does a boot, or the veneer a table. it is on the nineteen rough serviceable savage portions that we fall back on emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial twentieth. civilization should wipe away our tears, and yet we weep and cannot be comforted. warfare is abhorrent to her, and yet we strike out for hearth and home, for honour and fair fame, and can glory in the blow. and so on, through everything.

so, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled in the dust, civilization fails us utterly. back, back, we creep, and lay us like little children on the great breast of nature, she that perchance may soothe us and make us forget, or at least rid remembrance of its sting. who has not in his great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward features of the universal mother; to lie on the mountains and watch the clouds drive across the sky and hear the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to let his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart, and to forget his woes, and let his identity be swallowed in the vast imperceptibly moving energy of her of whom we are, from whom we came, and with whom we shall again be mingled, who gave us birth, and will in a day to come give us our burial also.

and so in my trouble, as i walked up and down the oak-panelled vestibule of my house there in yorkshire, i longed once more to throw myself into the arms of nature. not the nature which you know, the nature that waves in well-kept woods and smiles out in corn-fields, but nature as she was in the age when creation was complete, undefiled as yet by any human sinks of sweltering humanity. i would go again where the wild game was, back to the land whereof none know the history, back to the savages, whom i love, although some of them are almost as merciless as political economy. there, perhaps, i should be able to learn to think of poor harry lying in the churchyard, without feeling as though my heart would break in two.

and now there is an end of this egotistical talk, and there shall be no more of it. but if you whose eyes may perchance one day fall upon my written thoughts have got so far as this, i ask you to persevere, since what i have to tell you is not without its interest, and it has never been told before, nor will again.