Kafir Stories | Page 7

an exact
counterpart of what her German mother had been at her age. Of her
Irish father she showed absolutely no trace in either appearance or
character.
Whilst the hymn was being sung, the probationer's earnest eyes rested
as often on the yellow-haired girl at the harmonium as on his particular
charge, the dusky choir. The eleven girls stood in a crescent, some
modest and demure enough, but others looking bold, their wanton,
roving eyes and generously developed figures being much in evidence.
The youngest girl might have been twelve years of age, and the eldest
twenty. The latter, a girl named Martha Kawa, was of a much lighter
colour than any of her schoolmates, but her physiognomy was of the
usual Kafir type. Her father was an Englishman, and her mother a
Gaika Kafir; she had passed her childhood in a native hut, and when,
five years previously, she was sent to the mission, she was in a
condition of absolute savagery. In the mission school her Aryan blood
told; she kept easily ahead of the other girls, and took all the best
prizes.
The hymn over, the girls curtsied "good-night" to the missionary and
his wife, and went to the dormitory escorted by the junior teacher. This

room was the very picture of neatness. The whitewashed walls were
decorated with Biblical pictures and illuminated texts, and the beds,
with blue counterpanes and snow-white linen, were without crease or
wrinkle. On each bed, near the foot, the occupier's shawl was folded,
and the manner of folding varied considerably. Small prizes were given
for the best folding designs, and considerable individuality was shown
in the competition. Several of the designs were marvels of ingenuity,
and indicated a true artistic faculty.
In a few moments, eleven dusky heads were reposing on eleven snowy
pillows.
II.
The Reverend Gottlieb Schultz was far more intellectual and cultivated
than the average of his class. Sent to labour in the Lord's Vineyard in
reclaiming the heathen of South Africa, immediately after his
ordination as a minister of the German Evangelical Church, at the age
of twenty-four, he had spent thirty-five years at his task. His wife
Amalia, selected for him by the Missionary Society, was sent out under
invoice five years after his arrival. She had thus been his helpmeet, and
a faithful one, for thirty years. Although childless, she was of a placid
and contented disposition; so much so that her smile became rather
wearisome from its very continuousness.
The good old missionary had outlived many illusions, and of the few
still remaining, the larger proportion related to the Fatherland he had
left so long ago and which he never more would see. His passionate
loyalty to the Hohenzollerns was, long after the events now recorded
had happened, the cause of his removing a resplendent portrait of
Bismarck from a prominent place in the dining-room; and hiding it
ignominiously behind a book-shelf, where it remained until 1893, when
the reconciliation between Emperor William and the ex-chancellor took
place. Then the portrait was again brought forth, and hung next to that
of Count Caprivi which had supplanted it.
On his top bookshelf, triumphant over a dreary jungle of theological
literature, might have been found the works of Goethe, Schiller,

Lessing and Freiligrath, and in a secret receptacle behind his little drug
cabinet reposed a complete edition of Heine. He was very well read in
English theological literature. He thought Luther the greatest of all
theologians, but his favourite reading was Tauler. He had an emotional
understanding of, and sympathy with, the "Friends of God."
And what illusions had he not outlived! Had he not seen the natives, for
whose benefit his blameless and strenuous life had been ungrudgingly
spent, sinking lower and lower, exchanging the virtues of barbarism for
the vices of civilisation? Had he not seen the chosen lambs of his flock
sink back into the savagery that surrounded them, lured by those tribal
rites which bear a fundamental resemblance to the ritual of the worship
of the Cyprian Venus? Had he not seen the land covered with
plague-spots in the shape of canteens from which poisonous liquor was
set flowing far and wide, ruining the natives, body and soul? All this
and more he had seen; all this and more he had prayed and struggled
against through the weary years. He still prayed, but he had almost
ceased from struggling.
One illusion he still retained. This was the firm belief that the average
barbarian was fully the equal of the average civilised man--an illusion
so common amongst the missionary fraternity early in this century, that
this equality was almost, if not quite, a fundamental axiom in all
missionary reasoning. In Mr. Schultz's case, this illusion had paled
from time to time in the face of