The Collected Works of John Buchan (Illustrated). Buchan John
big hotel opposite the railway station, and looked and behaved like a pair of lowbred South Africans home for a spree. It was a fine bright day, so I hired a motor-car and said I would drive it myself. We asked the name of some beauty-spot to visit, and were told Cintra and shown the road to it. I wanted a quiet place to talk, for I had a good deal to say to Peter Pienaar.
I christened that car the Lusitanian Terror, and it was a marvel that we did not smash ourselves up. There was something immortally wrong with its steering gear. Half a dozen times we slewed across the road, inviting destruction. But we got there in the end, and had luncheon in an hotel opposite the Moorish palace. There we left the car and wandered up the slopes of a hill, where, sitting among scrub very like the veld, I told Peter the situation of affairs.
But first a word must be said about Peter. He was the man that taught me all I ever knew of veld-craft, and a good deal about human nature besides. He was out of the Old Colony—Burgersdorp, I think—but he had come to the Transvaal when the Lydenburg goldfields started. He was prospector, transport-rider, and hunter in turns, but principally hunter. In those early days he was none too good a citizen. He was in Swaziland with Bob Macnab, and you know what that means. Then he took to working off bogus gold propositions on Kimberley and Johannesburg magnates, and what he didn’t know about salting a mine wasn’t knowledge. After that he was in the Kalahari, where he and Scotty Smith were familiar names. An era of comparative respectability dawned for him with the Matabele War, when he did uncommon good scouting and transport work. Cecil Rhodes wanted to establish him on a stock farm down Salisbury way, but Peter was an independent devil and would call no man master. He took to big-game hunting, which was what God intended him for, for he could track a tsessebe in thick bush, and was far the finest shot I have seen in my life. He took parties to the Pungwe flats, and Barotseland, and up to Tanganyika. Then he made a speciality of the Ngami region, where I once hunted with him, and he was with me when I went prospecting in Damaraland.
When the Boer War started, Peter, like many of the very great hunters, took the British side and did most of our intelligence work in the North Transvaal. Beyers would have hanged him if he could have caught him, and there was no love lost between Peter and his own people for many a day. When it was all over and things had calmed down a bit, he settled in Bulawayo and used to go with me when I went on trek. At the time when I left Africa two years before, I had lost sight of him for months, and heard that he was somewhere on the Congo poaching elephants. He had always a great idea of making things hum so loud in Angola that the Union Government would have to step in and annex it. After Rhodes Peter had the biggest notions south of the Line.
He was a man of about five foot ten, very thin and active, and as strong as a buffalo. He had pale blue eyes, a face as gentle as a girl’s, and a soft sleepy voice. From his present appearance it looked as if he had been living hard lately. His clothes were of the cut you might expect to get at Lobito Bay, he was as lean as a rake, deeply browned with the sun, and there was a lot of grey in his beard. He was fifty-six years old, and used to be taken for forty. Now he looked about his age. I first asked him what he had been up to since the war began. He spat, in the Kaffir way he had, and said he had been having hell’s time.
‘I got hung up on the Kafue,’ he said. ‘When I heard from old Letsitela that the white men were fighting I had a bright idea that I might get into German South West from the north. You see I knew that Botha couldn’t long keep out of the war. Well, I got into German territory all right, and then a skellum of an officer came along, and commandeered all my mules, and wanted to commandeer me with them for his fool army. He was a very ugly man with a yellow face.’ Peter filled a deep pipe from a kudu-skin pouch.
‘Were you commandeered?’ I asked.
‘No. I shot him—not so as to kill, but to wound badly. It was all right, for he fired first on me. Got me too in the left shoulder. But that was the beginning of bad trouble. I trekked east pretty fast, and got over the border among the Ovamba. I have made many journeys, but that was the worst. Four days I went without water, and six without food. Then by bad luck I fell in with ‘Nkitla—you remember, the half-caste chief. He said I owed him money for cattle which I bought when I came there with Carowab. It was a lie, but he held to it, and would give me no transport. So I crossed the Kalahari on my feet. Ugh, it was as slow as a vrouw coming from nachtmaal. It took weeks and weeks, and when I came to Lechwe’s kraal, I heard that the fighting was over and that Botha had conquered the Germans. That, too, was a lie, but it deceived me, and I went north into Rhodesia, where I learned the truth. But by then I judged the war had gone too far for me to make any profit out of it, so I went into Angola to look for German refugees. By that time I was hating Germans worse than hell.’
‘But what did you propose to do with them?’ I asked.
‘I had a notion they would make trouble with the Government in those parts. I don’t specially love the Portugoose, but I’m for him against the Germans every day. Well, there was trouble, and I had a merry time for a month or two. But by and by it petered out, and I thought I had better clear for Europe, for South Africa was settling down just as the big show was getting really interesting. So here I am, Cornelis, my old friend. If I shave my beard will they let me join the Flying Corps?’
I looked at Peter sitting there smoking, as imperturbable as if he had been growing mealies in Natal all his life and had run home for a month’s holiday with his people in Peckham.
‘You’re coming with me, my lad,’ I said. ‘We’re going into Germany.’
Peter showed no surprise. ‘Keep in mind that I don’t like the Germans,’ was all he said. ‘I’m a quiet Christian man, but I’ve the devil of a temper.’
Then I told him the story of our mission. ‘You and I have got to be Maritz’s men. We went into Angola, and now we’re trekking for the Fatherland to get a bit of our own back from the infernal English. Neither of us knows any German—publicly. We’d better plan out the fighting we were in—Kakamas will do for one, and Schuit Drift. You were a Ngamiland hunter before the war. They won’t have your dossier, so you can tell any lie you like. I’d better be an educated Afrikander, one of Beyers’s bright lads, and a pal of old Hertzog. We can let our imagination loose about that part, but we must stick to the same yarn about the fighting.’
‘Ja, Cornelis,’ said Peter. (He had called me Cornelis ever since I had told him my new name. He was a wonderful chap for catching on to any game.) ‘But after we get into Germany, what then? There can’t be much difficulty about the beginning. But once we’re among the beer-swillers I don’t quite see our line. We’re to find out about something that’s going on in Turkey? When I was a boy the predikant used to preach about Turkey. I wish I was better educated and remembered whereabouts in the map it was.’
‘You leave that to me,’ I said; ‘I’ll explain it all to you before we get there. We haven’t got much of a spoor, but we’ll cast about, and with luck will pick it up. I’ve seen you do it often enough when we hunted kudu on the Kafue.’
Peter nodded. ‘Do we sit still in a German town?’ he asked anxiously. ‘I shouldn’t like that, Cornelis.’
‘We move gently eastward to Constantinople,’ I said.
Peter grinned. ‘We should cover a lot of new country. You can reckon on me, friend Cornelis. I’ve always had a hankering to see Europe.’
He rose to his feet and stretched his long arms.
‘We’d better begin at once. God, I wonder what’s happened to old Solly Maritz, with his bottle face? Yon was a fine battle at the drift when I was sitting up to my neck in the Orange praying that Brits’ lads would take my head for a stone.’
Peter was as thorough a mountebank, when he got started, as Blenkiron himself. All the way back to Lisbon he yarned about Maritz and his adventures in German South West till I half believed they were true. He made a very good story of our doings, and by his constant harping on it I pretty soon got it into my memory. That was always Peter’s way. He said if you were going to play a part, you must think yourself into it, convince yourself that you were it, till you really were it and didn’t act but behaved naturally.