Fourteen Shillings

by H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

You ask why the old man limps when the frost is in the ground, and why he will not cross the Umgeni by the drift below the gum-trees, but goes round by the bridge, which is an hour longer. Sit closer, then, and keep the little ones from the fire, and I will tell you about the paper that could not wait, and the river that would not let it pass, and what I was paid. In those days I was called Sihlahla, son of Gwala, and I was a runner. You have seen the train go up to Johannesburg with the mail-van behind, and you think the letters of the white men have always gone upon wheels. They have not. In those days there was a post-cart, with mules and a horn, and when a thing could not wait for the cart, which went once in the week, and stuck in every sluit between Pretoria and the Berg, they sent it by a man's legs. My legs were good. I do not boast now, for they are not good any more; but in the year that the white men call 1877 there was no one in Somtseu's following who could eat up a road as I could. They said of me, He sleeps running. That was nearly true. I had learned to rest the mind while the feet went on, as the ox rests one side of its jaw while it chews with the other.

I was paid by the journey. A long journey was a sovereign, which is twenty shillings, and food on the road if I could find it. Also I had two huts by the Umgeni, on the land that had been my father's, one for my wife MaNgcobo and one for my mother, who was a widow, and on each of those huts the Government of Natal took its tax each year. Once the tax had been seven shillings for a hut. Two years before the tale I tell you, the Government had doubled it, so that it was fourteen shillings, and for two huts twenty-eight. Remember the number. I remembered it every day of that year, as a man with a thorn in his foot remembers the foot.

So when Somtseu went up into the Transvaal, with his few white men and his five-and-twenty police, to sit among the Boers and talk, I went with his people, because there was money in it. That was all. I did not go to see the Queen's business done. I did not know what the Queen's business was.

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Pretoria in those days was a little town in a hollow among hills, with water running down the sides of the streets in furrows, and willow-trees, and roses gone wild over the walls. In the middle was a great open square with a church in it, where the Boers came in on Sundays in their wagons, and outspanned, and sat on the wagon-boxes in their black clothes, very grave. The Boers did not love Somtseu. Yet they did not drive him out, for they had no money in their treasury, and their President had gone away from them in his heart, and the Bapedi had beaten them in the north, and they were afraid of Cetshwayo in the east. A people that is afraid of three things will sometimes let a fourth thing sit down among them, if it sits quietly. Somtseu sat very quietly. He sat for nearly three months. He was a great one for sitting.

On the twelfth day of the month the white men call April, in the morning, they read a paper in the square.

I was there, by the wall of a store, with the other runners and the grooms. There were not very many white men to hear it: some English from the stores, who cheered, and some Boers, who did not, and stood in a lump with their hats on and their arms folded, and one old man among them who spat upon the ground at every sentence, slowly, as if he were counting. The man who read was one of Somtseu's officers, an older man, one of the chiefs of his household. He read for a long time in a loud voice. Then his voice went thin, like a stream in the dry season, and stopped, and he stood with the paper shaking in his hand. I thought he had been taken with a sickness. And then one of the young ones among Somtseu's people, a tall boy with a long face, who used to come and squat by our fire in the evenings and ask us the names of things in Zulu and write them down, took the paper out of the big man's hand and read on to the end, very fast and rather high, as a boy reads in a mission school when the teacher is listening.

When it was finished the English cheered again, and the Boers turned round and went back to their wagons, and the old man spat once more, and that was all. No one was killed. I had expected that someone would be killed, because I had been told that something great was being done, and in my country when something great is done, someone is always killed. I was disappointed, and a little ashamed of being disappointed.

That night the tall boy came and found me by the fire behind Somtseu's house.

"Sihlahla," he said—he spoke Zulu like a child, with the clicks in the wrong places, but he spoke it, which most of them would not—"Somtseu says you are to run."

He had in his hand a leather bag, flat, with a strap, and a seal of red wax upon the fastening, and a brass plate on the flap with writing on it. He put it into my hands. It was not heavy. I remember that I was surprised it was not heavier.

"It is to go to the Governor at Maritzburg," he said, "into his own hand, or into the hand of his secretary, and to no one else. It must not wait for the cart. It must not get wet. If it gets wet the words will run, and then it will be as if you had carried nothing."

I asked him what was in it, though I knew it was not my business. He looked at me for a little time, and then he laughed, and said, "This morning," and pointed towards the square.

Then he took a shilling out of his own pocket, not the Government's, and gave it to me, and said, "That is for the river." I did not know then what he meant. I think he only meant that I should buy food at the drift. But I have thought since that perhaps the young one knew more about rivers than he let us see.

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I left before the moon was up. I will not tell you every step of the road, for the road is like a song with too many verses, and the young men now go up it in a day and a night in the train and think nothing of it. I will tell you the parts that a man remembers.

The first part was the cold. Where the high veld begins, south of Pretoria, the land goes up and up and lies flat under the sky like a hide pegged out to dry, and there is no tree on it and no hill, and the wind comes across it in the autumn nights with frost in its teeth. I ran in a blanket, with the bag strapped upon my chest under the blanket, against my skin, and I could feel the hard edge of the brass plate upon my breastbone with every step. By the second night the edge had worn the skin away there, and I have the mark of it still, a little pale square. You may feel it, afterwards, if you like. Your grandmother used to say it was the Queen's brand, and that I had been bought.

I slept little, and in the daytime, in the long grass, where no one rides. A runner does not sleep at night on the high veld. At night the cold kills you if you lie still.

On the second day I passed Heidelberg, which is a little place of the Boers among some ridges, and I went round it and not through it, because a black man running with a bag through a Boer town on that particular week might have been asked questions. Beyond Heidelberg the rain began.

It was late in the season for rain, and it had no business to come. But it came in the night, from the east, without thunder, a thick grey rain that did not fall so much as stand in the air; and it rained like that for two days and two nights without stopping. The veld turned to mud, and every hollow became a pond, and every little spruit that I could have stepped across on the way up was now running brown and loud, up to my knees, up to my waist. I took the bag off my chest and carried it on my head, wrapped in my blanket, and so I ran with my body naked in the cold, and my blanket and the Queen's paper dry upon my head, like a woman carrying beer.

On the fourth morning I came down to the Vaal, at the drift where Commandant Stander had his farm.

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You have seen the Umgeni in flood, from the bridge. You have not seen the Vaal at the end of a wet season with two more days' rain upon it. It is not a river then. It is a country moving. It was the colour of the mud on an ox's belly, and it was very wide, and very smooth in the middle, which is worse than rough, for the smooth places are where it is deepest and runs fastest. Whole trees went past in it, turning round slowly, with their roots in the air like the hands of drowning men. And there was a dead ox, and then another.

There was a pont at that drift, a kind of raft that went across on a rope. The rope was there, stretched across the water, singing in the wind. The pont was drawn up on the bank on the far side, with no one near it.

On my side there was a little house of sods, and a Boer sitting in the door of it, smoking. He was not old and he was not young. He had a red beard and a gun across his knees, and a little boy beside him who stared at me. I stood in the rain and greeted him and asked him when the pont would cross.

He said, in Dutch, which I understood a little, "When the river goes down."

I asked him when the river would go down.

He said, "When God pleases."

Then he looked at me a long while, at the bundle on my head, and he said, "What have you got there?"

I said that I had a letter.

He said, "Whose letter?"

Now I could have lied. A runner learns to lie as a hare learns to double. But I was tired and cold, and I thought of the tall boy in the square reading very fast, and I said, "Somtseu's."

The Boer took his pipe out of his mouth. He did not get up. He did not lift his gun. He said, very quietly, so that I could hardly hear him for the river, "Then it can wait, like the rest of us." And he put his pipe back again, and went on looking at the water.

I have thought about that man a great deal, more than about the white men who were kind to me or the ones who were cruel. He did not hate me. He had nothing to say to me at all. He had lost his country that week, by a paper read in a square where he was not standing, and he was sitting in the door of his house with his child to see whether the river would give it back.

I went up the bank a little way, out of his sight, and sat down under a thorn-tree in the rain and thought.

I could wait. No one would blame a runner because the Vaal was in flood. I could sit three days by the drift, or five, and go on when the river let me, and still be paid my sovereign. And I sat and counted. One sovereign, twenty shillings. Two huts, twenty-eight shillings. Every man in Natal who has two huts and one sovereign can do that sum, and does it, at night, more often than he says his prayers.

And I thought also of what the young one had said, that the paper must not wait. And I thought of the Boer in his doorway. And I understood, sitting under that thorn, that I did not care at all, one way or the other, whose country it was across that river; that the Boers had never done anything for me, nor the English either, except take my fourteen shillings twice over; and that all the same I was going to swim. I do not know why. I have had fifty years to think of a reason, and the best I can find is that I was a runner, and it was a river, and the young one had laughed when he gave me the bag, as one laughs when a thing is too big to be said. A man does not always do things for a reason. Sometimes he does them because he has been asked by someone who looked at him.

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Listen now, for this is the part your grandmother made me tell at every beer-drink until the men went to sleep.

I walked up the river along the bank until I was out of sight of the drift and of the Boer, perhaps half an hour. Then I found what I wanted: a place where the bank on my side ran out in a long tongue into the water, and the current struck it and was thrown across towards the far side, so that a man going in there would be carried over, if he was carried at all. A man who does not know rivers swims straight across and is drowned in the middle. A man who knows them lets the river do the work and spends his strength only on keeping his head up.

There was a dead tree on the bank, a willow that the flood had already half pulled out. I worked at it with my hands and with my knobkerrie until it came free, and rolled it down into the shallows. It was not big: a trunk about the length of a man, with some branches. I tied my blanket round the bag, tight, as tight as I could, and then I tied it to the highest branch with the strap, so that it rode above the water. Then I took off everything else I had, which was not much, and left it under a stone, and I lay down in the water beside the tree, with one arm over the trunk, and pushed off.

The cold of that water! I have been cold since, many times. I was cold in the war with Cetshwayo that came after, when we lay all night in the dew above the Tugela. But I have never been cold like that. It went into me as a spear goes in, all at once and to the bone, and my breath stopped in my chest, and for a while I could not breathe at all, but only hold on to the willow and be carried.

The river took us out very fast. In the middle it turned the tree round, so that the bag swung down towards the water, and I had to climb up upon the trunk and lie along it to make it ride the other way. Something big came against my legs under the water, very hard, and was gone. I think it was another tree. I think now it was that which broke the bone of my shin, but I did not feel it break; I only felt the blow. We went down, and down, and the far bank went past, a long way off, with the willows standing in water up to their waists, and I began to think that the Queen's paper would go all the way to the sea with me, which would have been a great joke against me, and I laughed, and swallowed a great deal of the Vaal.

And then the current did what I had wanted it to do, and threw us over towards the farther side, into a bend where the water spread out among the drowned trees and went slow. The willow ran in among some branches and stopped. I let go of it and went under, and came up, and got hold of a branch, and so, from branch to branch, came in to where my feet touched mud.

I went back for the bag. That was the hardest thing I did that day. The tree had swung round and was beginning to work loose, and the water was trying to have it. I cut the strap with my teeth, because I had no knife, and put the bag on my head, and walked out of the Vaal with it, upon one good leg and one that would not do what I told it, and lay down in the mud on the bank and was sick.

Afterwards I untied the blanket. The outside was soaked through. The leather of the bag was dark with wet at one corner, where the blanket had slipped. But when I put my hand inside the flap, under the seal—I did not break the seal; I put in two fingers only, at the side—the paper in it was dry.

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The rest is only road. I went on towards Natal with a stick under one arm, slower than an old woman, and slept in the kraals of people who took me in for the sake of my leg, and came over the Nek and down to Newcastle. There the magistrate, when he saw the brass plate, put me and the bag upon a horse behind one of his policemen; and so I came down through the thornveld, where it was warm again, riding, which is a shameful thing for a runner, and I have never told it at a beer-drink until now. I came to Maritzburg on the fourteenth day after leaving Pretoria. At the Governor's house a white man at the door would not let me in, because I had no clothes but a borrowed blanket and my leg was swollen like a pumpkin. I stood in the road and said I had a bag from Somtseu, and would give it into no hand but the Governor's or his secretary's, and I said it many times, very loud, until the secretary himself came out to see what the noise was, and I gave it to him.

He broke the seal there in the road, standing, and read. Then he looked at me, and at my leg, and said, "You came over the Vaal?"

I said I had.

He said, "The cart is still at Stander's. It will be there for days." And he went in again quickly, without saying anything more, with the paper in his hand; and I was taken round to the kitchen and given meat.

Afterwards I learned that the news had come to Natal before ever my bag did, two days before, by another way: by a man on a horse, they said, who had crossed at another drift far down the river, where it ran wide and slow. So the thing I had carried was already known. The secretary had only wanted the paper to put in a box. I do not know if that is true. Perhaps the man on the horse was a story too. When I was young I was angry about that. Now I am not angry. A thing that is written must be carried by somebody, even when everyone already knows it, or it is not written.

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They paid me my sovereign. A white clerk at a table counted it out to me in shillings, twenty of them, because there was no gold that day, and wrote in a book, and made me put my mark against my name. And I limped home along the Umgeni to my own place, and lay in my mother's hut for two moons with my leg tied between two pieces of wood, and your grandmother fed me with a spoon and called me a fool, every day, for ever; and I was very happy.

In the winter the tax-collector came, as he came every winter, with his book and his policeman, and sat at a table under the big fig-tree by the store, and every man came up in his turn.

When it was my turn I came up on my stick. I had the shillings in a little bag of goat-skin, the twenty from the Governor's clerk and the one from the tall boy at Pretoria, which I had never spent, for there had been nothing to buy at the drift but a Boer's silence. I counted them out on the table in front of him, one at a time, in two little piles: fourteen for my wife's hut, and fourteen for my mother's. I had seven left over to begin the second pile with, and I had to borrow the other seven from my brother Bheki, who grumbled.

The collector wrote in his book, and swept the coins off the edge of the table into his box, and called the next man, who was old Zondi with his three huts.

I have wondered sometimes which of those shillings was the young one's, the one for the river. But they all look alike, with the Queen's head upon them; and they went into the box together, and back to the Queen, who had sent them out; and I took up my stick and went home.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ab Henrīcō Rider Haggard per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

H. Rider Haggard, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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