Greenmantle rh-2 Read online

  ‘Brandt,’ I said, ‘Cornelis Brandt. That’s my name now, and don’t you forget it. Who is the captain here? Is it still old Sloggett?’

  ‘_Ja,’ said Peter, pulling himself together. ‘He was speaking about you yesterday.’

  This was better and better. I sent Peter below to get hold of Sloggett, and presently I had a few words with that gentleman in his cabin with the door shut.

  ‘You’ve got to enter my name in the ship’s books. I came aboard at Mossamedes. And my name’s Cornelis Brandt.’

  At first Sloggett was for objecting. He said it was a felony. I told him that I dared say it was, but he had got to do it, for reasons which I couldn’t give, but which were highly creditable to all parties. In the end he agreed, and I saw it done. I had a pull on old Sloggett, for I had known him ever since he owned a dissolute tug-boat at Delagoa Bay.

  Then Peter and I went ashore and swaggered into Lisbon as if we owned De Beers. We put up at the 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 veldcraft, 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 w
hen 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. The two men who had started that morning from the hotel door had been bogus enough, but the two men that returned were genuine desperadoes itching to get a shot at England.

  We spent the evening piling up evidence in our favour. Some kind of republic had been started in Portugal, and ordinarily the cafes would have been full of politicians, but the war had quieted all these local squabbles, and the talk was of nothing but what was doing in France and Russia. The place we went to was a big, well-lighted show on a main street, and there were a lot of sharp-eyed fellows wandering about that I guessed were spies and police agents. I knew that Britain was the one country that doesn’t bother about this kind of game, and that it would be safe enough to let ourselves go.

  I talked Portuguese fairly well, and Peter spoke it like a Lourenco Marques bar-keeper, with a lot of Shangaan words to fill up. He started on curacao, which I reckoned was a new drink to him, and presently his tongue ran freely. Several neighbours pricked up their ears, and soon we had a small crowd round our table.

  We talked to each other of Maritz and our doings. It didn’t seem to be a popular subject in that cafe. One big blue-black fellow said that Maritz was a dirty swine who would soon be hanged. Peter quickly caught his knife-wrist with one hand and his throat with the other, and demanded an apology. He got it. The Lisbon _boulevardiers have not lost any lions.

  After that there was a bit of a squash in our corner. Those near to us were very quiet and polite, but the outer fringe made remarks. When Peter said that if Portugal, which he admitted he loved, was going to stick to England she was backing the wrong horse, there was a murmur of disapproval. One decent-looking old fellow, who had the air of a ship’s captain, flushed all over his honest face, and stood up looking straight at Peter. I saw that we had struck an Englishman, and mentioned it to Peter in Dutch.

  Peter played his part perfectly. He suddenly shut up, and, with furtive looks around him, began to jabber to me in a low voice. He was the very picture of the old stage conspirator.

  The old fellow stood staring at us. ‘I don’t very well understand this damned lingo,’ he said; ‘but if so be you dirty Dutchmen are sayin’ anything against England, I’ll ask you to repeat it. And if so be as you repeats it I’ll take either of you on and knock the face off him.’

  He was a chap after my own heart, but I had to keep the game up. I said in Dutch to Peter that we mustn’t get brawling in a public house. ‘Remember the big thing,’ I said darkly. Peter nodded, and the old fellow, after staring at us for a bit, spat scornfully, and walked out.

  ‘The time is coming when the Englander will sing small,’ I observed to the crowd. We stood drinks to one or two, and then swaggered into the street. At the door a hand touched my arm, and, looking down, I saw a little scrap of a man in a fur coat.

  ‘Will the gentlemen walk a step with me and drink a glass of beer?’ he said in very stiff Dutch. ‘Who the devil are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Gott strafe _England!’ was his answer, and, turning back the lapel of his coat, he showed some kind of ribbon in his buttonhole.

  ‘Amen,’ said Peter. ‘Lead on, friend. We don’t mind if we do.’

  He led us to a back street and then up two pairs of stairs to a very snug little flat. The place was filled with fine red lacquer, and I guessed that art-dealing was his nominal business. Portugal, since the republic broke up the convents and sold up the big royalist grandees, was full of bargains in the lacquer and curio line.

  He filled us two long tankards of very good Munich beer.

  ‘_Prosit,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘You are from South Africa. What make you in Europe?’

  We both looked sullen and secretive.

  ‘That’s our own business,’ I answered. ‘You don’t expect to buy our confidence with a glass of beer.’

  ‘So?’ he said. ‘Then I will put it differently. From your speech in the cafe I judge you do not love the English.’

  Peter said something about stamping on their grandmothers, a Kaffir phrase which sounded gruesome in Dutch.

  The man laughed. ‘That is all I want to know. You are on the German side?’

  ‘That remains to be seen,’ I said. ‘If they treat me fair I’ll fight for them, or for anybody else that makes war on England. England has stolen my country and corrupted my people and made me an exile. We Afrikanders do not forget. We may be slow but we win in the end. We two are men worth a great price. Germany fights England in East Africa. We know the natives as no Englishmen can ever know them. They are too soft and easy and the Kaffirs laugh at them. But we can handle the blacks so that they will fight like devils for fear of us. What is the reward, little man, for our services? I will tell you. There will be no reward. We ask none. We fight for hate of England.’

  Peter grunted a deep approval.

  ‘That is good talk,’ said our entertainer, and his close-set eyes flashed. ‘There is room in Germany for such men as you. Where are you going now, I beg to know.’

  ‘To Holland,’ I said. ‘Then maybe we will go to Germany. We are tired with travel and may rest a bit. This war will last long and our chance will come.’

  ‘But you may miss your market,’ he said significantly. ‘A ship sails tomorrow for Rotterdam. If you take my advice, you will go with her.’

  This was what I wanted, for if we stayed in Lisbon some real soldier of Maritz might drop in any day and blow the gaff.

  ‘I recommend you to sail in the _Machado,’ he repeated. ‘There is work for you in Germany - oh yes, much work; but if you delay the chance may pass. I will arrange your journey. It is my business to help the allies of my fatherland.’

  He wrote down our names and an epitome of our doings contributed by Peter, who required two mugs of beer to help him through. He was a Bavarian, it seemed, and we drank to the health of Prince Rupprecht, the same blighter I was trying to do in at Loos. That was an irony which Peter unfortunately could not appreciate. If he could he would have enjoyed it.

  The little chap saw us back to our hotel, and was with us the next morning after breakfast, bringing the steamer tickets. We got on board about two in the afternoon, but on my advice he did not see us off. I told him that, being British subjects and rebels at that, we did not want to run any risks on board, assuming a British cruiser caught us up and searched us. But Peter took twenty pounds off him for travelling expenses, it being his rule never to miss an opportunity of spoiling the Egyptians.

  As we were dropping down the Tagus we passed the old _Henry the Navigator.

  ‘I met Sloggett in the street this morning,’ said Peter, ‘and he told me a little German man had been off in a boat at daybreak looking up the passenger list. Yon was a right notion of yours, Cornelis. I am glad we are going among Germans. They are careful people whom it is a pleasure to meet.’

  CHAPTER FOUR Adventures of Two Dutchmen on the Lo
ose

  The Germans, as Peter said, are a careful people. A man met us on the quay at Rotterdam. I was a bit afraid that something might have turned up in Lisbon to discredit us, and that our little friend might have warned his pals by telegram. But apparently all was serene.

  Peter and I had made our plans pretty carefully on the voyage. We had talked nothing but Dutch, and had kept up between ourselves the role of Maritz’s men, which Peter said was the only way to play a part well. Upon my soul, before we got to Holland I was not very clear in my own mind what my past had been. Indeed the danger was that the other side of my mind, which should be busy with the great problem, would get atrophied, and that I should soon be mentally on a par with the ordinary backveld desperado.

  We had agreed that it would be best to get into Germany at once, and when the agent on the quay told us of a train at midday we decided to take it.

  I had another fit of cold feet before we got over the frontier. At the station there was a King’s Messenger whom I had seen in France, and a war correspondent who had been trotting round our part of the front before Loos. I heard a woman speaking pretty clean-cut English, which amid the hoarse Dutch jabber sounded like a lark among crows. There were copies of the English papers for sale, and English cheap editions. I felt pretty bad about the whole business, and wondered if I should ever see these homely sights again.

  But the mood passed when the train started. It was a clear blowing day, and as we crawled through the flat pastures of Holland my time was taken up answering Peter’s questions. He had never been in Europe before, and formed a high opinion of the farming. He said he reckoned that such land would carry four sheep a morgen. We were thick in talk when we reached the frontier station and jolted over a canal bridge into Germany.

  I had expected a big barricade with barbed wire and entrenchments. But there was nothing to see on the German side but half a dozen sentries in the field-grey I had hunted at Loos. An under-officer, with the black-and-gold button of the Landsturm, hoicked us out of the train, and we were all shepherded into a big bare waiting-room where a large stove burned. They took us two at a time into an inner room for examination. I had explained to Peter all about this formality, but I was glad we went in together, for they made us strip to the skin, and I had to curse him pretty seriously to make him keep quiet. The men who did the job were fairly civil, but they were mighty thorough. They took down a list of all we had in our pockets and bags, and all the details from the passports the Rotterdam agent had given us.