Traffics and Discoveries

"Then get those two greasers into their dinghy and hoist the blue peter.

We're out of action."

"Can you do it, Sir?" said Pyecroft at the foot of the ladder. "Do you think it is in the English language, or do you not?"

"I don't think I can, but I'll try. If it takes me two years, I'll try."

* * * * *

There are witnesses who can testify that I have used no artifice. I have, on the contrary, cut away priceless slabs of opus alexandrinum. My gold I have lacquered down to dull bronze, my purples overlaid with sepia of the sea, and for hell-hearted ruby and blinding diamond I have substituted pale amethyst and mere jargoon. Because I would say again "Disregarding the inventions of the Marine Captain whose other name is Gubbins, let a plain statement suffice."

THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER

THE KING'S TASK

After the sack of the City, when Rome was sunk to a name,
In the years when the Lights were darkened, or ever Saint Wilfrid came.
Low on the borders of Britain, the ancient poets sing,
Between the cliff and the forest there ruled a Saxon king.

Stubborn all were his people, a stark and a jealous horde —
Not to be schooled by the cudgel, scarce to be cowed by the sword;
Blithe to turn at their pleasure, bitter to cross in their mood,
And set on the ways of their choosing as the hogs of Andred's Wood …

They made them laws in the Witan, the laws of flaying and fine,
Folkland, common and pannage, the theft and the track of kine;
Statutes of tun and of market for the fish and the malt and the meal,
The tax on the Bramber packhorse and the tax on the Hastings keel.
Over the graves of the Druids and over the wreck of Rome
Rudely but deeply they bedded the plinth of the days to come.
Behind the feet of the Legions and before the Northman's ire,
Rudely but greatly begat they the body of state and of shire.
Rudely but greatly they laboured, and their labour stands till now
If we trace on our ancient headlands the twist of their eight-ox plough.

THE COMPREHENSION OF PRIVATE COPPER

Private Copper's father was a Southdown shepherd; in early youth Copper had studied under him. Five years' army service had somewhat blunted Private Copper's pastoral instincts, but it occurred to him as a memory of the Chalk that sheep, or in this case buck, do not move towards one across turf, or in this case, the Colesberg kopjes unless a stranger, or in this case an enemy, is in the neighbourhood. Copper, helmet back-first advanced with caution, leaving his mates of the picket full a mile behind. The picket, concerned for its evening meal, did not protest. A year ago it would have been an officer's command, moving as such. To-day it paid casual allegiance to a Canadian, nominally a sergeant, actually a trooper of Irregular Horse, discovered convalescent in Naauwport Hospital, and forthwith employed on odd jobs. Private Copper crawled up the side of a bluish rock-strewn hill thinly fringed with brush atop, and remembering how he had peered at Sussex conies through the edge of furze-clumps, cautiously parted the dry stems before his face. At the foot of the long slope sat three farmers smoking. To his natural lust for tobacco was added personal wrath because spiky plants were pricking his belly, and Private Copper slid the backsight up to fifteen hundred yards…

"Good evening, Khaki. Please don't move," said a voice on his left, and as he jerked his head round he saw entirely down the barrel of a well-kept Lee-Metford protruding from an insignificant tuft of thorn. Very few graven images have moved less than did Private Copper through the next ten seconds.

"It's nearer seventeen hundred than fifteen," said a young man in an obviously ready-made suit of grey tweed, possessing himself of Private Copper's rifle. "Thank you. We've got a post of thirty-seven men out yonder. You've eleven – eh? We don't want to kill 'em. We have no quarrel with poor uneducated Khakis, and we do not want prisoners we do not keep. It is demoralising to both sides – eh?"

Private Cooper did not feel called upon to lay down the conduct of guerilla warfare. This dark-skinned, dark-haired, and dark-eyed stranger was his first intimate enemy. He spoke, allowing for a clipped cadence that recalled to Copper vague memories of Umballa, in precisely the same offensive accent that the young squire of Wilmington had used fifteen years ago when he caught and kicked Alf Copper, a rabbit in each pocket, out of the ditches of Cuckmere. The enemy looked Copper up and down, folded and re-pocketed a copy of an English weekly which he had been reading, and said: "You seem an inarticulate sort of swine – like the rest of them – eh?"

"You," said Copper, thinking, somehow, of the crushing answers he had never given to the young squire, "are a renegid. Why, you ain't Dutch. You're English, same as me."

"No, khaki. If you cannot talk civilly to a gentleman I will blow your head off."

Copper cringed, and the action overbalanced him so that he rolled some six or eight feet downhill, under the lee of a rough rock. His brain was working with a swiftness and clarity strange in all his experience of Alf Copper. While he rolled he spoke, and the voice from his own jaws amazed him: "If you did, 'twouldn't make you any less of a renegid." As a useful afterthought he added: "I've sprained my ankle."

The young man was at his side in a flash. Copper made no motion to rise, but, cross-legged under the rock, grunted: "'Ow much did old Krujer pay you for this? What was you wanted for at 'ome? Where did you desert from?"

"Khaki," said the young man, sitting down in his turn, "you are a shade better than your mates. You did not make much more noise than a yoke of oxen when you tried to come up this hill, but you are an ignorant diseased beast like the rest of your people – eh? When you were at the Ragged Schools did they teach you any history, Tommy – 'istory I mean?"

"Don't need no schoolin' to know a renegid," said Copper. He had made three yards down the hill – out of sight, unless they could see through rocks, of the enemy's smoking party.

The young man laughed; and tossed the soldier a black sweating stick of "True Affection." (Private Copper had not smoked a pipe for three weeks.)

"You don't get this – eh?" said the young man. "We do. We take it from the trains as we want it. You can keep the cake – you po-ah Tommee." Copper rammed the good stuff into his long-cold pipe and puffed luxuriously. Two years ago the sister of gunner-guard De Souza, East India Railway, had, at a dance given by the sergeants to the Allahabad Railway Volunteers, informed Copper that she could not think of waltzing with "a poo-ah Tommee." Private Copper wondered why that memory should have returned at this hour.

"I'm going to waste a little trouble on you before I send you back to your picket quite naked – eh? Then you can say how you were overpowered by twenty of us and fired off your last round – like the men we picked up at the drift playing cards at Stryden's farm – eh? What's your name – eh?"

Private Copper thought for a moment of a far-away housemaid who might still, if the local postman had not gone too far, be interested in his fate. On the other hand, he was, by temperament, economical of the truth. "Pennycuik," he said, "John Pennycuik."

"Thank you. Well, Mr. John Pennycuik, I'm going to teach you a little 'istory, as you'd call it – eh?"

"'Ow!" said Copper, stuffing his left hand in his mouth. "So long since I've smoked I've burned my 'and – an' the pipe's dropped too. No objection to my movin' down to fetch it, is there – Sir?"

"I've got you covered," said the young man, graciously, and Private Copper, hopping on one leg, because of his sprain, recovered the pipe yet another three yards downhill and squatted under another rock slightly larger than the first. A roundish boulder made a pleasant rest for his captor, who sat cross-legged once more, facing Copper, his rifle across his knee, his hand on the trigger-guard.

"Well, Mr. Pennycuik, as I was going to tell you. A little after you were born in your English workhouse, your kind, honourable, brave country, England, sent an English gentleman, who could not tell a lie, to say that so long as the sun rose and the rivers ran in their courses the Transvaal would belong to England. Did you ever hear that, khaki – eh?"

"Oh no, Sir," said Copper. This sentence about the sun and the rivers happened to be a very aged jest of McBride, the professional humorist of D Company, when they discussed the probable length of the war. Copper had thrown beef-tins at McBride in the grey dawn of many wet and dry camps for intoning it.

"Of course you would not. Now, mann, I tell you, listen." He spat aside and cleared his throat. "Because of that little promise, my father he moved into the Transvaal and bought a farm – a little place of twenty or thirty thousand acres, don't – you – know."

The tone, in spite of the sing-song cadence fighting with the laboured parody of the English drawl, was unbearably like the young Wilmington squire's, and Copper found himself saying: "I ought to. I've 'elped burn some."

"Yes, you'll pay for that later. And he opened a store."

"Ho! Shopkeeper was he?"

"The kind you call "Sir" and sweep the floor for, Pennycuik… You see, in those days one used to believe in the British Government. My father did. Then the Transvaal wiped thee earth with the English. They beat them six times running. You know thatt– eh?"

"Isn't what we've come 'ere for."

"But my father (he knows better now) kept on believing in the English. I suppose it was the pretty talk about rivers and suns that cheated him – eh? Anyhow, he believed in his own country. Inn his own country. So– you see – he was a little startled when he found himself handed over to the Transvaal as a prisoner of war. That's what it came to, Tommy – a prisoner of war. You know what that is – eh? England was too honourable and too gentlemanly to take trouble. There were no terms made for my father."

"So 'e made 'em 'imself. Useful old bird." Private Copper sliced up another pipeful and looked out across the wrinkled sea of kopjes, through which came the roar of the rushing Orange River, so unlike quiet Cuckmere.

The young man's face darkened. "I think I shall sjambok you myself when I've quite done with you. No, my father (he was a fool) made no terms for eight years – ninety-six months – and for every day of them the Transvaal made his life hell for my father and – his people."

"I'm glad to hear that," said the impenitent Copper.

"Are you? You can think of it when I'm taking the skin off your back – eh?.. My father, he lost everything – everything down to his self-respect. You don't know what thatt means – eh?"