Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland | Page 6

faults. Why
didn't they? He, Peter Halket, did not feel responsible for them.

Everyone knew that you had to sell out at the right time. If they didn't
choose to sell out at the right time, well, they didn't. "It's the shares that
you sell, not the shares you keep, that make the money."
But if they couldn't sell them?
Here Peter Halket hesitated.--Well, the British Government would have
to buy them, if they were so bad no one else would; and then no one
would lose. "The British Government can't let British share-holders
suffer." He'd heard that often enough. The British taxpayer would have
to pay for the Chartered Company, for the soldiers, and all the other
things, if IT couldn't, and take over the shares if it went smash, because
there were lords and dukes and princes connected with it. And why
shouldn't they pay for his company? He would have a lord in it too!
Peter Halket looked into the fire completely absorbed in his
calculations.- -Peter Halket, Esq., Director of the Peter Halket Gold
Mining Company, Limited. Then, when he had got thousands, Peter
Halket, Esq., M.P. Then, when he had millions, Sir Peter Halket, Privy
Councillor!
He reflected deeply, looking into the blaze. If you had five or six
millions you could go where you liked and do what you liked. You
could go to Sandringham. You could marry anyone. No one would ask
what your mother had been; it wouldn't matter.
A curious dull sinking sensation came over Peter Halket; and he drew
in his broad leathern belt two holes tighter.
Even if you had only two millions you could have a cook and a valet, to
go with you when you went into the veld or to the wars; and you could
have as much champagne and other things as you liked. At that
moment that seemed to Peter more important than going to
Sandringham.
He took out his flask of Cape Smoke, and drew a tiny draught from it.
Other men had come to South Africa with nothing, and had made

everything! Why should not he?
He stuck small branches under the two great logs, and a glorious flame
burst out. Then he listened again intently. The wind was falling and the
night was becoming very still. It was a quarter to twelve now. His back
ached, and he would have liked to lie down; but he dared not, for fear
he should drop asleep. He leaned forward with his hands between his
crossed knees, and watched the blaze he had made.
Then, after a while, Peter Halket's thoughts became less clear: they
became at last, rather, a chain of disconnected pictures, painting
themselves in irrelevant order on his brain, than a line of connected
ideas. Now, as he looked into the crackling blaze, it seemed to be one
of the fires they had make to burn the natives' grain by, and they were
throwing in all they could not carry away: then, he seemed to see his
mother's fat ducks waddling down the little path with the green grass on
each side. Then, he seemed to see his huts where he lived with the
prospectors, and the native women who used to live with him; and he
wondered where the women were. Then--he saw the skull of an old
Mashona blown off at the top, the hands still moving. He heard the
loud cry of the native women and children as they turned the maxims
on to the kraal; and then he heard the dynamite explode that blew up a
cave. Then again he was working a maxim gun, but it seemed to him it
was more like the reaping machine he used to work in England, and
that what was going down before it was not yellow corn, but black
men's heads; and he thought when he looked back they lay behind him
in rows, like the corn in sheaves.
The logs sent up a flame clear and high, and, where they split, showed a
burning core inside: the cracking and spluttering sounded in his brain
like the discharge of a battery of artillery. Then he thought suddenly of
a black woman he and another man caught alone in the bush, her baby
on her back, but young and pretty. Well, they didn't shoot her!--and a
black woman wasn't white! His mother didn't understand these things;
it was all so different in England from South Africa. You couldn't be
expected to do the same sort of things here as there. He had an
unpleasant feeling that he was justifying himself to his mother, and that

he didn't know how to.
He leaned further and further forward: so far at last, that the little white
lock of his hair which hung out under his