Le Roi Est Mort

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Title:     Le Roi Est Mort
Author: Arthur Shearly Cripps [More Titles by Cripps]

The railway had almost crept up to Alexandra Then--the seventy-three miles of its sandy pilgrimage were all but complete. In three months or so it would be open to those who could afford their penny a mile no, but I am forgetting, on the privileged group to which it belongs no European may travel third-class.

I did not welcome that railway with any warmth. The district that it tapped had seemed to me a camping-ground of refuge, as civilization pressed on. That district was a haven for the Kaffir-trader, a haven for the transport-rider, a haven too for the foot-slogging missionary, like myself. We have our faults, all three doubtless, and deserve the spurning of civilization's iron feet, when our time comes, doubtless. On the other hand our displacement is a matter for some sympathy, it is likely to hurt like other displacements. Also we are prone to note that the admirable iron feet of our displacer are not unmixed with baser clay.

I came to Shumba Siding last Eastertide, on my way to Alexandra. Charles Miller was there in charge of the line, and he offered me a thirty-one mile ride in to within two miles of town if I would only wait for a construction train. I declined in my stupid sentimentality. For one thing I hate breaking up a plan of combined foot-travel; it seems to me hard on one's native fellow-travelers, on whom one is apt to call for big efforts. To ride on ahead, and leave them struggling alone with the sandy monster of a road for any long distance, seems vile desertion, and I was by no means sure that the invitation to board the train included them. Moreover, this might be my last journey in, on the old road, under the old order.

So I declined, but I lunched with Charles Miller Before I went on. Marvell was there, the Kaffir store-keeper from ten miles away. He had much to tell me of his wonderful good luck. The big firm that were putting up the new Store at Alexandra, that rail-head terminus designate, had asked him to manage it.

He could marry now on his prospects. He had wanted to see me, and had waylaid me on my road. The bride was due by coach to-morrow. He hoped to get a Special License when once she had arrived. Would I marry them on Monday?

We had a good lunch with healths afterwards, but they let me drink them in tea. Miller proposed the health of the bridegroom, to whom the railway, or ever it came, had brought luck. Might his luck last while the rails lasted, and grow heavier when they should be replaced by heavier metals! Might he never make less in a year than that railway had cost per mile! 'Three thousand five hundred will take some making,' Marvell sighed to me. He acknowledged the toast and proposed the Railway's prosperity. He grew rather florid to my thinking, about the benefit to the District how Kaffir gardens were to be displaced by up-to-date farming, how tourists were to pour in athirst to explore its ruins. He discoursed of the blessedness of ranching, and of chrome and asbestos syndicates. He said that we were in at the death alike of malaria, of blackwater, and horse-sickness. Then I spoke up for the other side. I asked them to remember the old Era in silence, and if they must drink, to drink to the transport-road and the transport-riders, and to all pioneers, and old hands going and gone, to the big native district and its dependencies, so rich in cattle and so rich in grain, to God's Eden of a country, and the people that He Himself had chosen to set there to dress it, and to keep it before our coming. My toast fell rather flat, I noticed. They both looked rather bored.

Soon I pressed on, with fifteen miles or so to cover before our camping-place would be reached.

I had gone some ten miles before the construction train passed me, and my carriers pressed through bushes and long grass for a nearer view of it.

With three or four white men on the engine, a Black Watch or two and a few other natives on the trucks, it snorted along through the woodland. As the night deepened and the moon rose, we came close to the last coach-stable, and were soon encamped.

The old Basuto near by gave me a drink of fairish water, but water was far away, I was told. My boys straggled away wearily, and came back at last, having seemingly missed the dipping-place. They had brought something between a liquid and a solid. Boiled, it was no doubt wholesome enough, but its taste was not such as to tempt to excess.

That night I dreamed, with a tag of Marvell's speech buzzing in my head (I had garrisoned it with quinine before I slept). That tag rang out in boastful refrain like the natives' curfew-bell of Alexandra, a bell not always very punctually rung. 'We are in at the death of malaria, of black-water, and of horse-sickness.'

So clanged the bell, the bell in the market tower, the tower of the dismantled pioneer fort. And it seemed to me that I saw Malaria a lean yellow ague-shaken shape with a Cape-boy sort of face, steal away out of the town past the new Railway Station, and across the river. He went, like a frightened Kaffir dog with a jackal-like yelp, far away into the Veld. I am not sure whether he did not become canine on the way, at least cynocephalous. I followed him. I went far in that following, over country that I remember as very difficult, there were so many stumps of trees about. Moreover, it had abundance of black-jacks to stud one's socks with. 'He is going through dry places seeking rest,' I thought. 'Soon he will return.' And sure enough we were to return by-and by. And a jackal pack of seven, that I was somehow expecting to come, came with us. We saw the lights of Alexandra soon, but the people had gone to bed, it seemed. There was no one about anywhere. Then the leading jackal fed foul and lapped long at a great black drain. Afterwards he howled under a window of the Hospital, and leaped through it, straddling his legs. Then I awoke.

I married Marvell on the following Monday, and partook of his wedding-lunch. He made a far more florescent speech than that earlier one, it compared with it as the nuptial champagne with Miller's bottled beer.

'The old Pioneer is now dead,' he told us, 'as dead as the Dodo or the Great Auk. No longer need we take Quinine to be "our grim chamberlain to usher us and draw" . . .' (here his memory of Hood failed him). 'No more need we shiver in our Kaffir blankets at Kaffir Stores 'fifty miles from the dead-ends of rail-less post-towns. "Le roi est mort." Malaria is dead or dying so far as Alexandra is concerned. We Alexandrians are now becoming wholesome Englishmen in a wholesome White Man's country. Long live the railway, and may it perforate the Alexandra District!' 'Amen,' said the best-man fervently. But I said nothing.

I admired Marvell. It was just like him to press a guinea on me for my Mission, though I told him there was no fee of any kind, and that I was ever so glad to be there. The remembrance of my dream stung me. I said something for conscience sake. 'Civilization has its perils,' I said dully, 'immature civilization. The period between no-drains and the up-to-date drainage system wants some living through.' 'That's all right,' Marvell declared. 'I'll watch it. I didn't go through Bloemfontein in the War for nothing.'

'Le roi est mort: vive le roi! 'Alack! If Malaria slackened hold, enteric tightened its clutch. People were found to say that the latter state of Alexandra was worse than the former. Marvell and Rose Marvell both got enteric. But, thank God, the uneasy misgivings engendered by that eight-devil dream of mine about Alexandra were not justified! They both won through. They are going back to England for a change next month (the hay-making month at home), they tell me.

'God made the country, and man made the town, and the devil made the little railway-swollen, transitional, Alexandra-sort-of-town.' So Marvell wrote to me by last mail. He is not so keen now on the transition stage of civilization for his wife's residence. He is thinking of a pioneer place in Northern Rhodesia, either that or London. If the perils of the old regime in Alexandra are diminished, the perils of the new regime appear to have a knack of growing.

[The end]
Arthur Shearly Cripps's short story: Roi Est Mort

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